ROBERT HENRYSON, FABLES: FOOTNOTES

1 Serious matters please more sweetly when mixed with entertainment

2 What [may] be therein just as long as the floor is clean

3 About mishaps there's no need for him to fear

4 Across moor and bog, through banks, thicket, and thornbush

5 Happy are those who take warning from the perils of others

6 By the assigned time of sitting that court used then

7 Without fear for bribes they allow the right to fail

8 Hang out your tongue, and close tight your two eyes

9 Until he almost fainted and died in that place

10 There was a farmer who had a plow; to guide

11 Then after they were unhitched once it grew very light

12 The wolf says, "Lowrence, you are playing 'It' in blindman's buff"

 

ROBERT HENRYSON, FABLES: EXPLANATORY NOTES

Abbreviations: Bartholomaeus: Bartholomaeus Anglicus, On the Properties of Things; Bs: the Bassandyne Print; CA: Gower, Confessio Amantis; Consolation: Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy; CT: Chaucer, Canterbury Tales; DOST: Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue; DSL: Dictionary of the Scots Language; Eneados: Douglas, Eneados; Fox, ed.: The Poems of Robert Henryson, ed. Fox; Gray: Gray, Robert Henryson; MED: Middle English Dictionary; MSc: Middle Scots; NIMEV: Boffey and Edwards, eds., New Index of Middle English Verse; NPT: Chaucer, Nun's Priest's Tale; OED: Oxford English Dictionary; OFr: Old French; Orpheus: Henryson, Orpheus and Eurydice; Perry: Perry, ed., Babrius and Phaedrus; PF: Chaucer, Parliament of Fowls; Testament: Henryson, The Testament of Cresseid; TC: Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde; Whiting: Whiting, Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases.



Fables (NIMEV 3703)

As attested in the print tradition, Henryson's Fables is a set of thirteen moralized tales headed by a Prologue. In large part, these tales are drawn from a curricular text of the Middle Ages, a collection of fables in Latin distichs (couplets), which has been identified in various ways: by its supposed author, Gualterus Anglicus (Walter of England); by its first modern editor, Anonymus Neveleti ("[Isaac] Nevelet's 'Anonymous'"); or by its medieval name, Romulus. The tenth-century Romulus is based on the first-century collection of Latin fables by Phaedrus, a Thracian freedman of the emperor Augustus; and Phaedrus begins his collection with the declaration "Aesopus auctor quam materiam repperit" ("Aesop is my source. He invented the substance of these fables"; Perry, pp. lxxiii–lxxxii, 190–91). Romulus contributed in the late twelfth century to the Fables of Marie de France, and to the French collections known as Isopets (Marie, Fables, p. 7). The fables in most of these derivations uphold the extreme brevity of the genre — De gallo et jaspide (The Cock and the Jasp) is a mere four distichs of tale and one of moral in Romulus; Marie completes this fable and its moral in eleven octosyllabic couplets. Early in the fifteenth century, John Lydgate turned to Romulus for his little sequence of Isopes Fabules. As presented in the print tradition, Henryson's Fables contains three sequences of fables from Romulus: at the beginning, the Prologue, The Cock and the Jasp, and The Two Mice; in the middle, The Sheep and the Dog, The Lion and the Mouse with its own prologue, and The Preaching of the Swallow; at the end, The Wolf and the Lamb and The Paddock and the Mouse. As is common to the tradition, each of Henryson's Fables ends with a Moralitas, a section in which the characters and events in the narrative are subjected to literal and allegorical moralization that sometimes challenges the present-day reader. Henryson draws inventively and learnedly on a rich tradition of scholastic commentary on "Aesop," that is, Romulus, especially as that tradition was disseminated in the Auctores octo morales ("Eight Moral Authors"): the Distichs of Cato, the Eclogue of Theodulus, the Facetus and De contemptu mundi by Bernard of Cluny, the Liber Floretus, the Tobias of Matthew of Vendôme, Alan of Lille's Doctrinale altum parabolarum, and finally the Romulus "Aesop." This collection of textbooks underpinned the elementary curriculum in medieval Europe.

In two sections inset into the overarching Aesopian sequence, Henryson's Fables in the print tradition include two groups of tales about foxes and wolves, drawn largely from the tradition of Reynard the Fox circulating from the twelfth century in Latin (the mock-epic Ysengrimus by Nivardus) and French (the many-branched compilation known as Le Roman de Renart, ca. 1175–1250, with later sequels); Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale comes from this tradition and provided Henryson a source for the first of his fables about foxes, The Cock and the Fox. Incorporation of Reynardian stories into collections of "Aesop" was well established by the time Henryson undertook to do so: Marie de France included such material (Marie, Fables, p. 7), as did Odo of Cheriton, whose Fables (dated 1225–40) appear to have been available to Henryson. A stimulus to such incorporation came in 1476–77, with Heinrich Steinhöwel's printing of his bilingual (Latin and German) schooltext Esopus, translated into French by Julien Macho (1480) and into English by William Caxton (1483–84; Davies, "Tale of Two Aesops"). Steinhöwel included seventeen so-called fabulae extravagantes in his collection, among them versions of "The Fox, the Wolf, and the Husbandman" and "The Wolf and the Wether." The term extravagantes (literally, "wandering outside") is usually associated with extra-canonical papal decrees, outside the Decree of Gratian and the Corpus Juris; in other words, the fabulae extravagantes ("non-canonical fables") have the same relation to Aesop as do the Extravagantes to the Decretales that formed the basis of the canon law for which Henryson, if the records pertain, received a degree at the University of Glasgow and which he appears to have practiced as a notary public in Dunfermline (see Introduction, above).

Henryson's handling of his sources for the Fables thus reveals a deep familiarity with the Aesopic tradition as embodied in the Romulus of the medieval curriculum, as well as a keen awareness of recent developments in the incorporation of extra-canonical material into the printed "Aesop" (Wheatley, Mastering Aesop, pp. 150–56, 162; Lyall, "Henryson's Moral Fabillis," 89–90). The ways in which Henryson's Fables were received by generations of Scottish readers can be glimpsed in the short poem with which the young Edinburgh merchant George Bannatyne begins the fifth part of his manuscript anthology, devoted to "the Fabillis of Esop, with divers uthir fabillis and poeticall workis . . . 156[6]8" (fol. 298r):

To the Redar. My freindis, thir storeis subsequent,    Albeid bot fabillis thay present, Yit devyne doctouris of jugement Sayis thair ar hid, but dowt, Grave materis wyis and sapient Under the workis of poyetis gent. Thairfoir be war that thow consent To blame thir heir set owt.

these stories Although only Yet learned doctors of theology there; without doubt Serious; thoughtful noble poets    be careful that you [don't] fall into the habit(?) criticize these [that are] set forth here

The allusions to "devyne doctouris" and concealed "Grave materis" indicate that, with a century and the Reformation separating him from Henryson's original composition of the Fables, Bannatyne still relishes the propriety of scholastic commentary's revealing the sudden conceptual leaps from within the vivid, even racy narrative.

Though still a matter for debate, the structural integrity of the Fables is being rediscovered in, for instance, the thematic significance of numbers: the thematic focus of the midmost lines in The Preaching of the Swallow and The Lion and the Mouse; the symbolic value of the numbers of stanzas, as in The Fox, the Wolf, and the Cadger (see the Explanatory Notes to lines 1461, 1754, and 2021–22). Indeed, the thematic consistency that emerges as the Fables unfold provides a powerful argument for their structural integrity (Greentree, Reader, pp. 81–89). Also subject to continued debate is the topicality of the Fables, the argument having been proffered that some passages allude to specific events. Summarizing Denton Fox's "brilliant account of the overall meaning of Henryson's selection and arrangement," Annabel Patterson notes that the structure of the Fables "illustrates the tragic ambiva-lence of Aesopian tradition with respect to its own powers of persuasion" (Fables of Power, p. 162n25).

A consideration of the text of the Fables should take as its primary tenet that "quite different textual traditions" are represented by the Bannatyne Manuscript and the Bassandyne print respectively (Fox, ed., p. lxxv). The text provided here follows modern practice (e.g., Wood, Fox, Kindrick, Gopen) in using the Bassandyne print as its base. However, credence has been given to the arguments advanced by Jamieson, MacQueen, and Burrow for the importance of the Bannatyne Manuscript as a witness to readings explainable as having been deemed linguistically obscure or doctrinally offensive by the late sixteenth-century Scottish printers. The present editor has noted the simplifications, modernizations, and expurgations that characterize Charteris, Bassandyne, and their descendants, and at such junctures has paid particular attention to the variant readings Bannatyne offers. As well, the present text follows Fox in occasionally preferring a reading from the Charteris and Lekprevik print of the Fables, on the grounds that variants between the text of this print and that of Bassandyne "should be judged solely on their merits" (Fox, ed., p. lxxiv); such variants sometimes occur because one or the other printer, faced with an unfamiliar word, has substituted a familiar one with a very different meaning (e.g., manfully in Bs for mane full, line 285), or because a common sort of mistake in transcription or typesetting has occurred (e.g., thus in Bs for this, line 1873).


Prologue

Several distinguished analyses have been made of this Prologue in relation to its brief source (twelve distichs long), the Prologue to the verse Romulus (e.g., Fox, "Henryson's Fables," pp. 338–41; Fox, ed., pp. 187–94; Kratzmann, "Henryson's Fables," pp. 50–57; Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance, pp. 187–92). See Aaron E. Wright's edition, The Fables of "Walter of England" for the text of the distichs with a medieval commentary (pp. 19–23).

title. The title provided in the early printed editions shows the influence of the printed Aesops derived from Steinhöwel (including Caxton's), headed by the story of Aesop the Phrygian: for Henryson, however, Aesop is a Roman, Christian lawyer, and poet, not an illiterate, pagan Phrygian slave (lines 1371–74n; compare Gopen, Moral Fables of Aesop, p. 17).

1 Here and elsewhere in the edition, an initial capital letter in boldface corresponds to the marking of sections in the principal witnesses with ornamented or otherwise amplified initials.
1–7 feinyeit fabils. The collocation of "feign" and "fable" recurs in Scots, often with the connotation of lying (DOST fen₃eit 2; compare Fables, line 1389); that "fable" and "falsehood" might be taken as synonymous can become realized as if in passing, as the work unfolds (e.g., the apparently straightfaced aside "but fabill," "without a lie" [line 2308]); as a whole, this stanza bears comparison with the discussion of fiction in lines 1379–97 and in Testament (64–70n).

3 polite termes of sweit rhetore. For later Middle Scots poets such as Gavin Douglas and Sir David Lyndsay, this line defines the high literary style: polished words and delectable eloquence (DOST polist 2; polit 2); compare Henryson's criticism of the lawyers who "under poleit termis falset mingis" (Fables, line 2716).

7 Figure is used, as elsewhere in the Fables (lines 59, 1258, 1400, 1451, 1614, 1971, "figuris" 2593; compare figurall, 587, 1099; figurate, 600, 2935), to refer to the allegorical status of a fiction in relation to the truth it in some way represents; compare Testament lines 506, 511.

8–14 In comparison to Chaucer with his "olde feldes" out of which "newe corn" simply "cometh" (PF, lines 22–23), Henryson emphasizes the sheer labor of cultivating the rich but intractable ground of fiction and language in order to produce a wholesome lesson; this work must be done repeatedly, with the reader coming after the writer like a pupil following the teacher (compare line 1734n).

10–12 In this organic image of the production and reception of a meaningful text, both the flowers and the grain are "springing"; hence, the adjectives "Hailsum and gude" refer to both as well (compare line 1904n).

15–16 Fables are traditionally justified in terms of the allegory — here, highly compressed — of the fable and moral as akin to the nutshell and its contents (compare lines 586–89). James Simpson suggests that the reading "The nuttis schell . . . is delectabill" should not be discarded hastily: "For the moralist who seeks abstract meanings in fiction, the shell is tough and the kernel sweet. For the lover of narrative, however, it's the other way around" ("Faith and Hermeneutics," pp. 225–26); the classic discussion of this figure remains Bernard Huppé and D. W. Robertson, Fruyt and Chaf.

17–19 Denton Fox (ed., p. 190) suggests that Stephen Hawes, an English poet at the court of Henry VII, may have imitated these lines in The Pastime of Pleasure (1509; lines 713–14).

20–25 In contrast to the allegory of the nutshell, the second, recreational, justification for fables may seem commonsensical but has its own curricular place (Boas and Botschuyver, Disticha Catonis 3.6). The allegory of the unbent bow is the latest in Henryson's sequence of brief figures; on this figure, see Glending Olson, Literature as Recreation, pp. 90–93.

26 sad materis. The mixture of merriness and seriousness seems at this juncture simply to be a matter of comic relief; subsequent events will deepen the ethical significance of the blend as a mirror of the pattern of existence (e.g., lines 193n, 331–33n, 345n, 368n, 642–43n).

28 Henryson is quoting the second line from the Prologue to Romulus (A. Wright, Fables, p. 19). H. Harvey Wood notes that "this quotation has been used as a clue in the attempt to discover Henryson's original for the fables" (Poemes and Fables, p. 225). It also appears on the title page of the Charteris text of the Fables. As becomes clear in the course of the Fables, mixing (which denotes augmenting but also corrupting and throwing into confusion) is a thematic as well as a stylistic principle underpinning the whole work (compare Testament 610–16n).

29–30 my maisteris . . . your correctioun. The mode of address changes (compare thee, thi in line 6, and we in line 22); modesty becomes the topic in a passage that exemplifies Machan's perception: "A diminished sense of self for both narrators and authors informs and, more importantly, enables Middle English writing" (Textual Criticism, pp. 97–98). Wheatley notes that maisteris is a term of address "appropriate to the classroom" (Mastering Aesop, p. 152); the poet is writing as if he is at school.

31–32 In mother toung . . . translatioun. The reference to "ane maner of translatioun" alludes tersely to the vernacular poet's power of invention: "What Henryson dramatizes, in effect, is the birth of the vernacular author whose father is literary authority and whose mother is vernacular language" (Machan, Textual Criticism, p. 130). Given the recent advance of Scots into the forum of official discourse (Introduction, p. 14, above), Henryson's reference to the "mother toung" is less self-deprecating than it is a tactical claim that, as a translator from Latin, the vernacular poet is advancing the right of his language to function at the center of public discourse — and the right of poetry to be situated at that center.

33–35 Lyall considers this "a typically Henrysonian touch, displacing responsibility for the idea but then declining to identify its true begetter" ("Structure," pp. 93–94); for Wheatley, the avoidance of vane presumpcioun entails suppression of a patron's name in the interest of a higher aim, "to glorify the spiritual [lord]" (Mastering Aesop, p. 153).

36–42 Such language recalls the bustious eird that demands cultivation if the flowers and grain are to grow (line 8, above; compare "rude and hamelie dite," line 119). The witty denial of eloquence is traditional: compare the Franklin's polished apology, CT V[F]718–20. Chaucer provides a precedent for the request, replete with ornate terms, for correction: TC 3.1331–36. Gray observes that "in asking for correction [Henryson] uses a cluster of words which are far from homely" (Robert Henryson, p. 83, note 13).

45–47 Priscilla Bawcutt and Felicity Riddy observe that the scholastic terms in these two lines (dispute, argow, sillogisme, propone, conclude, exempill, similitude) "suggest that Aesop's animals behave remarkably like academics of Henryson's day" (Selected Poems of Henryson and Dunbar, p. 212).

47–49 Henryson thus demonstrates the capacity of an allegory to work through inversion: people behaving like animals might be predicted to be the opposite of animals behaving like people, and yet the latter become an allegory of the former; and both phenomena involve an inversion of the proper working of creatures in their proper spheres of being.

50 ff. "Men like beasts" is scriptural (Psalm 49 [48]:12; 2 Peter 2:12) and Boethian (Consolation 3.pr5; 4.pr3, me3). This statement of the unreinable tendency to sensuality anticipates but does not articulate the proverb "Like a dog to its vomit," from 2 Peter 2:22 (compare Proverbs 26:11), the memorably graphic conclusion of a scriptural passage that underpins this stanza; see also line 2972n.

56 The topic of humanity rendered bestial appears in the Prologues to the Auctores octo, the curricular compilation that featured "Aesop"; by this means, Henryson follows his source in emphasizing "the figurative nature of the poet's project" (Wheatley, Mastering Aesop, pp. 153–54).

58 Aesop's gay metir and facound purpurat, the distichs of Romulus, implicitly find their counterpart in Scots rhyme royal; Henryson is alluding to the legitimate descent from his source to his translatioun even as he alludes to the gulf between them.

59–60 Henryson indicates that fables decorously conceal topics that might otherwise offend classes of people, high or low; raising the topic by appearing to dismiss it, he refers to the satirical and polemical capacity of this sort of narrative.

61 The Prologue ends by announcing the topic of the ensuing fable; thereby the textual link between the two sections is strengthened, and the location of The Cock and the Jasp at the start of Henryson's Fables explicitly parallels its location in Romulus.


The Cock and the Jasp

Henryson's source is the first fable in the verse Romulus (A. Wright, Fables, pp. 23–26), which is a mere four distichs long plus a single one for the Moralitas.

69 The term jasp (Latin, jaspis) tends to refer to various kinds of semiprecious chalcedony, a stone consisting of silica and quartz: the green (prase, chrysoprase, plasma), green with red (heliotrope), white, banded, and multicolored (onyx), banded brown (agate), or gray-blue varieties have been referred to as jasp, but not the red varieties sardonyx and carnelian. These stones were used for seal impressions because wax does not stick to their lustrous, smooth surface. Especially in Egypt, the Middle East, and Central Asia, these stones have been carved into intaglios and cameos since ancient times. If, as is typical, the jasp in this fable is thought of as a seal, it is to be regarded as not just a valuable item but an authentication of the identity of its owner — like modern guarantees of identification, crucial but difficult to replace.

81 Specifying an "ideal possessor" for a jewel is a topic in medieval texts about jewels, the lapidaries (Bishop, "Lapidary Formulas," p. 476).

82 The contrast between pietie and mydding deserves comparison with Hary's diction when his hero Wallace is thrown onto the midden at Ayr: "Thai kest him our out of that bailfull steid . . . In a draff myddyn quhar he remainyt thar" (McKim, Wallace, 2.255–57). Also in the background is the tercel's rebuke of the duck in PF: "Out of the donghil cam that word ful right" (line 597).

83 muke and mold. With the primary sense of "dung and dirt" goes a second meaning by which muke is wealth and mold is the humus from which the human body was created (OED muck n.1.II.4; mould/mold n.1.I.2.a). In regard to the wrongful setting of the jewel, Bishop notes the parallel with the Middle English poem Pearl (lines 22–24; see "Lapidary Formulas," p. 476).

86 Here and in line 100, the cock insistently rejects the allure of cullour; compare the "gay metir and facound purpurat" of Aesop's style (line 58).

102 An instance in which the "mother toung" (line 31) turns out to be more subtle than its user realizes, the proverb might be translated, "Looking is easy work," though the rooster, thinking only of filling his stomach, assumes that "light" means "unsubstantial"; for other instances in which the wisdom of proverbs ironically reflects on its user, see lines 1763n and 1997n.

106–12 Here is the "anaphoric climax" of the rooster's specious speech, in which he has used lapidary topics such as the ideal setting as "a substitute for thought . . . to justify his leaving well alone." In the last line of the stanza, Bishop notes especially the rooster's "self-centred" completion of his earlier remark that "thow ganis not for me" (line 80) with "nor I for thee" (line 112; see "Lapidary Formulas," p. 477).

120–26 However many properties are actually listed here (and the stanza may have been incompletely revised; Fox, ed., pp. 197–98), Henryson's account of the jasp is comparable with the discussion of this precious stone in the great medieval encyclopedia De proprietatibus rerum ("On the Properties of Things") by Bartholomaeus Anglicus: though "the chief colour therof be grene it hath many othere colours ymedlid among. . . . [It] dryveth away fantasies, and maketh a man siker in periles. . . . And me troweth that it hath as many vertues as dyvers colours and veynes" (XVI.52, Seymour-Smith, On the Properties of Things, 2:853).

129–30 The "deidis of vertew" are being described as surpassingly "excellent" in that they, like the jasp, derive from heaven.

139 In "Schir, ye have mony servitouris," Dunbar alludes to this scripturally redolent line (Matthew 6:19–20) in his insistence that his well-made verse is proof against "wering or consumptioun, / Roust, canker, or corruptioun" (lines 31–32); compare Aesop's frustration with a roustit, cankered world (lines 1396–97).

142–45 The passage is rich in scriptural reminiscences, beginning with the commonly cited epitome of the ignorantly mocking fool: "The fool has said in his heart, 'There is no God'" (Psalm 13 [14]:1).

146–47 Unlike the scriptural pigs goaded to violent retaliation by a diet of pearls (Matthew 7:6), this sow merely gets sick; the moralist does not engage in a preacher's full-scale denunciation of obdurate ignorance.

151 The scriptural allusion to the surpassingly valuable pearl for which the merchant sold all he owned (Matthew 13:45) makes the connection explicit between the jasp and the kingdom of heaven.

159 Of this mater to speik, it wair bot wind. One of many junctures at which the moralist pulls back from explicitly applying the fable to present circumstances; implicit, however, is a warning to the reader not to assume that the moral lessons to be uncovered in this work are inapplicable.

161 thair refers to the midden in the fable, in which the jasp was unexpectedly and unprofitably uncovered, but also to the actual lines of the fable in which the jasp is mentioned, as well as the lines in the moral in which it is interpreted.


The Two Mice

Henryson's source is the twelfth fable in the verse Romulus (A. Wright, Fables, pp. 45–49), which at fifteen distichs for the story and one for the Moralitas is a trifle more expansive than were either the Prologue or De gallo et iaspide. Fox surveys the key differences between the version in Romulus and Henryson's: in the latter, the mice are sisters and they experience two interruptions to their feast, one by a steward and one by a cat; both these changes from Romulus occur in other versions of the fable (Fox, ed., p. 201).

166–68 No mere rehash of Romulus, this opening provides a telling anticipation, the quhyle / Quhilis construction (compare lines 331–33), as well as an emphasis on crime that is only partly developed in the ensuing narrative; for the latter, compare the eighteenth-century poet Allan Ramsay's version of this passage (see Introduction); the opposition of briers to corn suggests an alternation of good times and bad that will assume depth as the Fables proceed (lines 184, 2541, 2545; compare line 2941).

172 In fifteenth-century Dunfermline the burgh gild was open to both artisans and merchants: "to judge by the expenditure on food and drink, conviviality was a principal function of its meetings" (Whyte, Scotland before the Industrial Revolution, p. 70); compare line 1558n.

173 "The mouse was exempt from the usual tolls, which were levied both on exports, such as wool and hides (the magna custuma), and on goods entering the burghs for sale in the markets (the parva custuma)" (Bawcutt and Riddy, Longer Scottish Poems, p. 355).

180–85 Resemblances are to be traced between the burgh mouse and Henryson's Orpheus, who traverses woods and wilsum wayis in search of Eurydice (lines 130, 155, 290, 414); compare the more explicitly penitential motive that almost convinces the shepherd mourning his dead dog to wander into the countryside (lines 2472–73n; compare Testament, lines 94–95n).

193 The mingling that will feature thematically at the end of the fable and again at the outset of the Moralitas (345n, 368n) emerges briefly at this apposite moment; indeed, the stanza includes some structural markers — the phrase fute for fute, for instance — that will recur more ominously in the final fable (line 2875).

204 The saying that thieves — evildoers generally — hate the light, ultimately scriptural (John 3:20; Whiting E184), assumes thematic importance as the Fables proceed (lines 618–20, 2294) and may be connected to the comparison between the soul and the eye of the bat, both of which can function only when the light is failing (lines 1636–40n); Gavin Douglas performs a self-reflexive variation on this theme in concluding The Palis of Honoure with the declaration that the poem is plagiarized, and "Thyft lovys lycht but lyte" (line 2167; also Dunbar, The Goldyn Targe, line 279).

206 The contrast between the two diets, one crude, the other dainty, becomes a theme of Cresseid's Complaint (Testament, lines 418, 440–41).

217 The burgh mouse has not come by her high standards by right of birth but is that frequent target of satire, the overweening commoner (compare Chaucer's guildsmen, CT I[A]361–78).

223 It is to strengthen the reader's exegetical teeth to work through textual tough nuts that the Fables have been written (lines 15–18, 1559n; compare Augustine, On Christian Doctrine 2.6.7).

229–31 The remonstration of the "rurall mous" assumes a sententious strain (line 225; Proverbs 15:17, 17:1; Whiting C176–78, M700).

248 To get her way, the burgh mouse inverts lavish Lenten fasting in the burgh and paltry rural Easter feasting; Dunbar reworks the theme in "Dumbaris Dirige to the King"; for further elaboration of the Lent-versus-Easter theme, see lines 2000–06n. Towards the end of the present fable, the rural mouse will return to this theme and set it right-ways-up (line 320n).

251 Though the burgh mouse has no fear of spring traps or box traps, she seems to know enough about them to distinguish between them; not so much can be said for Henryson's copyists (Textual Notes, line 251n).

257, 262 Henryson's reference to the nocturnal activity of the mice is a realistic detail but also suggests that this mode of travel involves a inversion of the usual scheme; likewise, the omission of the usual decorous greeting intensifies the sense of an increasingly offensive neglect of proprieties; see also line 268.

264 In the version of this fable by Marie de France, the foodstuffs are limited to "Plenté de farine e de miel" ("Plenty of flour and honey"; Marie, Fables, 9.27).

279 John A. Burrow notes the omission of an unstressed syllable in the first foot of the line; for Henryson, this is an unusual departure from the metrical norm, but may be an instance of poetic foregrounding: "The headless line may be original, reflecting the town mouse's emphasis" (English Verse, p. 343, note 118).

281 The unusual word subcharge, "additional course in the meal," recurs with irony in line 346.

285 This line caused the copyists difficulty; Bannatyne calls the pièce de résistance of the feast furmag, cheese (a word nowhere else attested in Middle Scots); that the difficult reading mane, fine white bread (compare MED pain-demeine; OED pandemain), is authoritative is suggested by its prominence in Odo's version of the fable (Jacobs, Fables, p. 87).

286 The whiteness of the candle is an indication of the good quality, and hence higher price, of the tallow used to make it.

287 Spices would be the expected serving at the end of a feast, but the mice have their own preferences. Lured to the sensation of eating spices, the print witnesses provide "gust thair mouth" for the mousier delight in B's reading "creisch thair teithis."

289 In interposing these common moralizing proverbs at this juncture (Whiting Y39, J58), Henryson makes a mock-heroic narrative transition (compare NPT, CT VII[B²]3205: "For evere the latter ende of joye is wo").

295 They taryit not to wesche. The alacrity of the mice is contrasted, appropriately, to the lavishing of time on preparations as in the ceremonious washing before the meal (line 268; compare CT I[A]3821–22: "And doun gooth al; he foond neither to selle, / Ne breed ne ale, til he cam to the celle / Upon the floor"). The present omission reflects ironically on the greedy omissions of proper etiquette mentioned earlier ("Withowt godspeid," "Withowtin grace," lines 262, 268); the inevitable lapse of etiquette shows the terror-stricken mice suddenly stripped of their pretensions. Compare the burlesque romance Rauf Coilyear (line 268), in which failure to wash indicates more straightforwardly a lack of refinement.

296–97 The form to ga instead of the expected past tense (yeid or hyit or haistit) indicates a lowering of the style and a related acceleration of the narrative: "But get out, whoever could get to the front of the crowd!" In their crowded haste, the mice are frustrating each other's efforts to escape (compare CT III[D]572–74: "I holde a mouses herte nat worth a leek / That hath but oon hole for to sterte to, / And if that faille, thanne is al ydo"). As often in Henryson's narration of action, the sudden shift from past to present tense indicates a further stylistic lowering to enhance the immediacy of the event.

320 thir fourty dayis suggests that these events are taking place during the long fast of Lent, or perhaps that the upland mouse feels the need to undertake penance — a whole Lent's worth — for her excesses and narrowly averted disaster.

326 In Romulus and its French derivations, it takes only one threat of capture to convince the country mouse to go home; Henryson's "rurall mous" attempts to regain her nerve and stay the course, only to suffer a more drastic encounter.
326, 329 Gib (an abbreviation of Gilbert) and Bawdronis are conventional Scots names for cats, the latter described as "affectionate" (DOST Gib n.; DSL Baudrons).

328 The simile alludes comically combat (Amis and Amiloun, line 1321; Golagros and Gawain, line 758; Whiting F190); the burlesque is augmented by the alliteration with fled (compare line 552).

331–33 The kittenish but deadly behavior is made emblematic of fortune (Greentree, Reader, p. 78; Lyall, "Structure," p. 95); the "Quhylis" (sometimes) topic associated with fortune recurs in similar circumstances (lines 166–68n, 1525n, 2892, 2939; Orpheus, line 516). The mingling of play and predation is like buk-heid (line 333), a rough version of "blindman's buff" (DOST buk-hid; compare lines 970, 2383).

336 The copyists differ as to where the rural mouse has gone: Bannatyne has her behind a dressour and the printers place her behind the burde. Asloan's reading, which has been adopted, implies that the chase is taking place in a hall, hung with curtains (Bawcutt and Riddy, Longer Scottish Poems, p. 358).

345 guse is gude. The contrast between the wished-for tasty goose and the unexpectedly sour garlic sauce becomes proverbial in later Scots (DOST gansel); if Henryson is not the author of the saying, he certainly infuses it with unprecedented thematic significance, exemplifying the principle of mingling that runs through this fable and out into the Fables as a whole.

365 At this point the stanza form changes from rhyme royal to the ballade (ababbcbC).

368 The intermingling of joy and adversity plays against the intermingling of fable and "gude moralitie." Implicitly, learning to read morally is an ethical practice in deciphering potentially deceptive appearances (line 2716n).

372 small possessioun. In the refrain, this repeated phrase reflects wittily upon a fable about the belongings proper to a mouse.

381–82 O wantoun man . . . Thy wambe . . . a god to be. The direct scriptural allusion (Philippians 3:19) opens a sequence of relevant concepts that emerge in the next two verses of the epistle: one's proper living place (compare the rural mouse's kith, line 351 and this cuntrie, line 379; Philippians 3:20); and the potential parallel between small, humble bodies and higher ones (Philippians 3:21). Compare the Pardoner's Tale, CT VI(C)520–33.

391–93 As Solomon sayis. Citing Solomon as an authority need not indicate a precise source in one of the books ascribed to him, though the lines here do paraphrase Ecclesiastes 3:12; as in the Moralitas to The Trial of the Fox (lines 1130–31), the prestige of his name adds luster to the reworking of a conventional theme.

395 maist degree. The distinction between worldly excess and true nobility, alluded to at various points in the fable, is emphasized at its endpoint.


The Cock and the Fox

Henryson's main source is Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale, though for the hens' speeches The Parliament of Fowls is an important contributor, as is the Wife of Bath's Prologue.

397–400 The concession to fiction that was indicated in the Prologue (lines 44–46), that animals may with propriety be represented as reasonable and articulate, appears now to be abandoned in favor of a more factually based principle: even though animals are without reasoning power, they still exemplify a diversity of natural inclinations.

407–10 The prospect of an unknowable infinity of animal natures, and thereby an infinity of fables, elicits a seemly gesture of incapacity from the poet. His avowed intention to write about the fox and the rooster thus seems a defeat on two levels: it has proven impossible to write inventively about nature; and the alternative is simply to retell an anecdote about a cais, an anecdote recalling an event "this ather yeir" (line 409). Assuming the guise of a dutiful old dog without the cunning to perform new tricks, Henryson may in fact be writing more like a "fenyeit, craftie, and cautelows" fox (line 402).

410 Chauntecleer is the name of the rooster in the Nun's Priest's Tale and also in Le Roman de Renart; this is only the second instance in the Fables of an animal having a name (after Gilbert, "Gib Hunter our jolie cat," line 326), and it signals a change in the generic affiliations of the ensuing tale.

411–13 In contrast to this curt dismissal, the widow in NPT is the subject of a little encomium of the simple life (CT VII[B²]2821–46); having been elaborated in the previous fable (e.g., lines 358–63, 373–80) this rustic theme would be redundant here.

415–17 Like the widow, the rooster is disposed of in a few lines; compare Chaucer's circumstantial portrait (CT VII[B²]2849–64); Henryson's Chantecleir will be described later, but through the varying perspectives of three of his wives (lines 495–543).

419–20 While Chaucer mentions the "yeerd . . . enclosed al aboute / With stikkes" before describing the rooster, Henryson places the description of the thicket after, in order for it to serve as the setting for the fox. In NPT, by contrast, many lines of discussion about dreams must pass before the description of the fox waiting "in a bed of wortes" (CT VII[B²]3221). Henryson gives the fox prominence: his character is no more or less than was predicted at the outset (line 402).

428 Chaucer's Chauntecleer cannot "ryde" Pertelote on their perch at night; "ful of joye and of solas," he does so in the daylight (CT VII[B²]3167–78). In contrast, Henryson's Chantecleir has been at work all night, and no mention is made of the narrowness of the perch — which is likely located under the roof of the widow's cottage (lines 584–85n). Klaus Bitterling reads for nicht as a compound adverb ("Robert Henryson, The Fables"): "Exhausted, having stayed up all night, Chantecleir flew from his nest" — one might suppose he is escaping.

429 As the name for the fox (compare Russell in NPT and Renard in the French sources), Lowrence occurs earliest in Henryson's Fables. The fox is unique in the Fables for the recurrence of his name, which has been explained as a pun on another word appearing earliest in this work, lour, "skulk" (line 952; DOST lour, v.; Lowrence). Breeze suggests, however, that the word lowry for "fox" derives from Brythonic Celtic, a language spoken in lowland Scotland and the north of England into the medieval period, with derivations surviving in place-names; compare early Welsh llewyrn, "foxes" ("Henryson's Lowrence the Fox," p. 300).

438–40 The fox broaches his offer of service, which will become the keynote of his appeal to Chantecleir; Chaucer's fox, in contrast, claims to have visited the yard "oonly for to herkne how that ye synge" (CT VII[B²]3290). Lowrence, meanwhile, claims that he owes duty to Chantecleir because of the bond of loyalty he shared with Chantecleir's father. Such bonds between lords and men were becoming increasingly formalized in fifteenth-century Scotland (Wormald, Lords and Men in Scotland, pp. 17–18).

449 The fox claims to have recited the dirge, the Matins of the Office of the Dead, "the liturgical text intoned daily for the souls of the dead" (Fein, Moral Love Songs, p. 289); knowledge of the dirge was spreading due to its inclusion in the medieval primer, the prayer book for lay people; the fox is flaunting his devotion but also his value as a literate and even clerkly servitor. The topic of the fox mourning is ubiquitous in the Roman de Renard.

462–63 Having neglected to crow according to his natural inclinatioun, the werie Chantecleir has declined from the proper conditioun of being a rooster; so claims the fox (lines 400, 428).

483 The hens' names each contain a diminutive suffix, -ok: "Bold little hen" (Pertok), "Speckled little hen" (Sprutok), and "Crested little hen" (Toppok). These names provided the occasion for inventiveness, if not occasional confusion, among later poets, copyists, and editors (Eneados 12 prol.159; Colkelbie Sow 3.105, 117; Fox, ed., p. 215).

491 Chaucer's widow remains conscious; Henryson prefers to let the focus shift to the hens' debate, a strikingly inventive amplification in a telling characterized by its compression.

498 Pertok's comparison between Chantecleir's voice and the clock tower bell corresponds to the detail in Chaucer's initial portrait of Chauntecleer (CT VII[B²]2854).

513–15 A forthrightly merry widow, Sprutok anticipates Dunbar's inventive elaboration in The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo: "I wald me prunya plesandly in precius wedis, / That luffaris myght apon me luke and ying lusty gallandis" (Bawcutt, Poems of William Dunbar, poem 3, lines 374–75).

533 From the wives' accumulated perspectives, Chantecleir combines apparently contradictory vices: having been called impotent and jealous (lines 517, 519), he is now an insatiable frequenter of prostitutes; he is a compendium of the more bestial inclinatiouns of husbands.

546–47 In later Scots, birkie denotes extreme bareness and paleness, like the white birch in winter (DSL birkie n3), so that Birkye may be a dog with short white fur. Berrie is assumably deep brown (like the Monk's horse, CT I[A]207); Bell has a fine ringing voice; and then there is poor Bawsie Broun — in Dunbar's Fasternis Evin in Hell, one of the devils is named "Bawsy Broun" (Bawcutt, Poems of William Dunbar, poem 47, line 30).

551–53 Alliteration functions here to enhance the impression of increasing force and speed. The first line starts slowly with double alliteration in the second foot; the pace increases in the third foot, with the recurrence pitched forward on the stressed syllable; then the b-less fourth foot produces a spurt towards bent, at the end of the line. In line 552, the conventional simile (line 328n) produces top speed. The lines move like the hounds, full wichtlie (line 553).

558 Chaucer's Chauntecleer speaks "In al his drede" (CT VII[B²]3406) and urges the fox to exult in his superior skill; Henryson's Chantecleir advises Lourence to defend his action as arising from a bond of friendship. In each case, the rooster is practicing the very trick that had previously fooled him, but here the theme on which it is based has become the false assurance of loyalty.

582 The lesson the fox derives from his loss is that a thief ought not to engage in formal dispute mechanisms like honest people, but just be a thief and make off with the goods. He has been fooled into acting on the values he had previously manipulated in order to catch Chantecleir.

584–85 Chantecleir is finally depicted as an ordinary farmyard bird, flying back to the place from which he emerged at the outset of the story (line 428), in at the lever (the outlet through which the smoke escaped from the fireplace) to his home under the thatched roof of the widow's cottage.

586–89 Henryson picks up the discussion, itself typically allegorical, about the relation between the narrative of a fable and its moralization (compare lines 15–18).

595–99 Pride in kin leaves one "without a leg to stand on"; the ensuing comparison to the Fall of the Angels (Revelations 12:7–9) reduces faith in one's lineage to a type of devilish self-love; the hounding of the feyndis infernall recalls the memorable episode, just read, of the hounding of the fox (lines 546–54).

600–13 In contrast to Chaucer, whose denunciation of flattery occurs digressively (CT VII[B²]3325–30), Henryson allows the theme sequential development in the Moralitas, where it can be treated allusively without loss of clarity: note the motif of sugar and gall, implicitly connecting flattery to Venus and Fortune (compare Testament lines 225–29) but also to Boethius' false Muses (Consolation 1.pr1).


The Fox and the Wolf

Sources: for the confession of the fox, Roman de Renart passim; for the baptism of the kid, Perry no. 655 (in a Romulus recension). "Many analogues to the two main actions can be found in earlier fable literature, but they are not known to have been combined before Henryson" (Fox, ed., p. 222).

614–17 The allusions to the widow, Chantecleir, "this foxe," and his abortive daylight raids all indicate that the ensuing fable is to be taken as the integral second part of an inset sequence within the Fables; more than The Cock and the Fox, The Fox and the Wolf is to feature Lowrence as its antihero.

621–24 The level of style rises suddenly with this chronographia, a stylized indication of time that sets the ensuing narrative off from the preceding material; at the outset, the mythology (Thetis the sea, Phoebus the sun, Hesperus the evening star) seems burlesque — a fox is waiting for nightfall.

628 The fox proceeds into a rougher landscape than those encountered so far in the Fables (though one should make allowances for the difference of scale affecting the mice); this hill, on which he perceives his likely fate, anticipates the craig (line 664) from which the wolf emerges and the heuch in which the fox lies in wait for suitable prey (lines 745, 747).

629–34 The preceding chronographia has in fact served to prepare for Lowrence's learned interest in astronomy, comparable to that shown by the poet at the outset of the Testament (lines 8–14); and in this regard, the poet claims Lowrence as his teacher.

635–36 MacQueen notes the propriety to the ensuing events of maleficent Saturn associated with the sign of the goat and justice-dealing Jupiter with the sign of the archer (Robert Henryson, p. 146).

639 Noting the astronomical impossibility of this alignment, Alison Hanham and J. C. Eade suggest that the opposition of Venus to Mars and Saturn is a purely thematic device connecting the fable to the denunciation of sensuality in the Moralitas, thereby preparing for the reference to the fox's fornication in the next fable (lines 799–800; "Foxy Astrology in Henryson," pp. 25–29).

642–43 Scanning the heavens, this fox appears to balance between reason and instinct; the first is his as an outcome of the fictional form (lines 47–48); the second is an outcome of his special place in the plenitude of nature (lines 407–10); in this mingled state, Lowrence is deeply versed in celestial signs even though he lacks an astronomer's instruments and charts.

649–55 "The reader is asked here to contemplate not the usual fox of fable to whom we may conveniently assign the human characteristics of guile and deceit and whom we may then satisfyingly frustrate or punish. This fox is stretched on the dilemma of the opposition between his natural and spiritual instincts" (Roerecke, "Integrity and Symmetry," pp. 78–79).

666–69 Drawing on Renardian sources, Odo also depicts the wolf as an imperfect cleric (Perry 539.595, 52.628); with propriety, Henryson's wolf has the guise of a Franciscan, a gray friar (line 679), precedent for which is interpolated into the Romance of the Rose (11222.lvi1–lviii9); as a doctor of theology, he should be on a par with those best qualified to apply moral precept to lived experience (1100–03); such moralizing and its learned practitioners do not always warrant respect (lines 1052–53, 2971–72). Still, the poet's attitude to such doctors is complicated: after all, they are "the teachers who interpret fables" (Wheatley, Mastering Aesop, p. 179).

676 The contraction dude ("do it"; DOST dude) provides the stanza with a pertly colloquial ending, one that belies the obsequious reverence the fox is showing his "gostlie father" (line 672) the wolf.

677 As a lanterne, he is taken to be a "guiding light" of moral instruction (MED lantern(e 4).

693 Benedicitie, the customary friar's greeting and, more generally, a common exclamation (e.g., CT III[D]241, 280, 1087), but also a metonymy for the rite of confession (e.g., CT I[A]205).

697 Gopen argues that "the narrator's sensitive withdrawal does not hinder him from giving a word-for-word account" (Moral Fables of Aesop, p. 12); by omitting to report the fox's actual confession, however, the poet has upheld the letter of his principle.

710 "Like Langland [Piers Plowman C.5.24: 'I am to wayke to wirche . . .'] and Hoccleve (Regement, 976–85) in similar situations, the fox alludes to Luke 16:3" (Pearsall, Chaucer, p. 492).

712–13 The elements necessary for perfyte confessioun that the fox lacks are "verray sorwe that a man receyveth in his herte for his synnes" and "sad purpos . . . neveremoore to do synne" (CT X[I]127–29).

719–21 Amenability to such negotiation is a theme of medieval satire against the friars (the so-called "antimendicant satire"; compare CT I[A]221–24).

731 neid may haif na law. Proverbial. See Whiting N51. Compare Piers Plowman B.20.10; Gower, CA 4.1167, 8.75; or variations like Chaucer, CTI[A]4026: "nede has na peer"; or Gower's frequent "nede he mot that nede schal" (CA 1.1714, 3.352, 8.1020).

734 The wording of this line recalls the title Asloan gives to the now-lost poem he ascribes to Henryson, "Master Robert Hendersonnis Dreme On Fut by Forth" (Introduction, p. 5); the Firth of Forth is the estuary on the north shore of which Dunfermline lies.

736 The fox's frustration on the shore offers a concise reenactment of the deflection of moral awareness that has been traced through the events of the fable so far.

751 Gray wittily and learnedly surveys the "splendid folk-motif" of the renaming of forbidden food, which is attested in Romulus (Gray, p. 116; Perry 569.655).

757–60 Always with ironic effect, the sensual impulse to warm one's belly recurs in Henryson's poems (line 1407; Testament, line 36), though this is the one time when the consequences are fatal. For the fox to make the wry assertion that it would be fitting to have an arrow in his belly seems an extreme provocation to an avenging thunderbolt of justice. On the other hand, this line may be a predecessor of the idiomatic expression "to make a bolt" of — that is, to take a risk on — something (Shakespeare, Merry Wives 3.4.24 qtd. OED bolt n.I.1.b); if so, the fox means to say, "My stomach is worth the risk"; but, as elsewhere in the Fables (e.g., line 2244), the literal meaning of his words comes unexpectedly uppermost.

775 The sudden, unprepared-for death is just the sort of schamefull end the fox had read for himself in the stars (line 653).

786–88 Having declared that fables provide symbolic instances of the ways in which certain kinds of people become like certain species of animals (lines 48–49, 399–40), the poet now indicates the circumstances in which both sorts of beings are neidlingis (necessarily) destroyed, namely through consuetude and ryte (line 782).


The Trial of the Fox

The motifs of the animals' parliament, the absent animal (a donkey rather than Henryson's mare), and the kicked wolf are assembled in Odo of Cheriton's fable De asino nolente venire ad parliamentum leonis (Perry no. 638). The trial of the fox occurs in the Roman de Renart, though there he is not executed (Branch 1.62–63.279–82, 458).

827–28 A characteristic Scots proverb about the fox (Whiting F 592; see also Dunbar's satire on the Gaelic chieftain Donald Owyr, ending "Ay rynnis the fox / Quhill he fute hais") leads into a typical detail of Scottish landscape, beyond the margins of arable soil: a peitpoit is a deep, waterlogged hole in a peat bog from which peat has been cut, mainly for fuel.

834–37 The poet exclaims on the familiar theme of the executor's disloyalty (Piers Plowman B.15.128; OED secutor), leading toward emphasis on their neglect of the duty to pray for the testator's soul; the Protestant printers rewrote this passage, which had become offensive for its devotional practice; in the process they emphasized the need to protect wealth, a theme at odds with the tenor of the passage (Textual Notes 836n, 837n).

839–40 The fanfare seems to shake the world, as it does in the Testament when Mars blows his horn (lines 195–96): "It is as though the tallies have been taken; the 'busteous Bugill' of the summoning Unicorn is highly suggestive of the trump of doomsday, as is the generally ominous tone the poet achieves in his description of the assemblage of beasts" (Roerecke, "Integrity and Symmetry," p. 85). The fox later takes up this apocalyptic theme (line 952).

842, 848 Decisively but not unchangeably, the arrival of the unicorn associates the animal kingdom with heraldry. In Scotland, heraldry was the concern of the court of the Lyon King of Arms, in which one of the junior heralds was the Unicorn Pursuivant. Oyas (Old French oiez, "Hear ye!") is the Scottish heraldic officer's proper cry before making an announcement to a gathering including knights and squires (DOST Oyes).

855–65 The lion's proclamation epitomizes and may parody the stiffly ceremonious style, ornamented with the stylized phrases and terms (celsitude, Lattis yow to wit, evin incontinent, Thinkis . . . to hald) typical of royal public discourse: a failure of proportion may occur in sending greeting to God and brutall beistis as if both were my subjectis grit and small.

866–72 The chronographia of a spring morning is decorously kingly, not least in its alliteration marking the stresses in the third line and following; to heighten the courtliness of this "pleasant place," indications of privilege (the sheer wealth, "as the gold" of vegetation, the buds of "spyce," the conspicuous consumption involved in cultivating grasses; compare Dunbar, The Goldyn Targe, lines 1–45) are interspersed with no less decorous scenic elements (the moisture-distilling clouds, the lark, merle, and mavis; compare lines 1321–27n).

873–79 Commencing with the nice detail of the three attendant leopards (the lions in the arms of England being known as leopards; Fox, ed., p. 237), the stanza depicts a series of royal appurtenances, in phrases marked by ornamental alliteration and a characteristic [modifier +] noun + modifier syntax.

887–920 By comparison with the catalogue of "mony diverse kynd" of beasts in The Kingis Quair (stanzas 155–57), Henryson's depiction is much longer, more syntactically variegated, semantically more negative, and more fanciful — arcane, even — in its names and details; it is a passage bound to give its copyists and editors headaches (e.g., lines 895n, 906n, 914n). As placing mythological beasts at the head of the list makes obvious, the passage is rhetorically encyclopedic; the reader need not be alarmed to encounter species repeated under various names.

893 Henryson depicts the camel in a way that recalls an Aristotelian association between gluttony and the neck of a crane, famously employed by Spenser (Nichomachean Ethics 3.10; Faerie Queene 1.4.21).

895 anteloip. The copyists may have made two animals out of one: the heraldic antelope has ax-like horns (OED antelope), and a sparth is literally a broad ax — "his sparth"? That something has gone amiss in the line is suggested by the lack of an unstressed syllable in the third foot.

903 In the Flyting, Dunbar combines Henryson's terms for the hedgehog and hare into a single insult: in his appearance and gait, Dunbar's opponent Walter Kennedie resembles a "Hard hurcheoun hirpland" (Bawcutt, Poems of William Dunbar, poem 65, line 179; compare Alexander Montgomerie, Cherrie and the Slae, second version, line 286).

906 The printed texts diverge markedly from the manuscript witness at this point (Textual Notes to line 906); Fox speculates that the manuscript reflects misunderstanding of a rare name like bonnacon (bison): this animal, with its reputedly "noxious excrement, could appropriately be linked to the notoriously stinking badger" (ed., p. 242).

914 The obscure names in this line have occasioned much speculation: ane refers elsewhere in MSc to the donkey, so that the second element of lurdane lane, Bannatyne's reading, becomes notionally plausible and thus is marginally preferred over the printers' apparently garbled bowranbane.

928 The widely distributed distich "Parcere prostatis scit nobilis ira leonis; / Tu quoque fac simile, quisquis dominaris orbe" (Bawcutt, Poems of William Dunbar, 2:398: "The noble lion's wrath knows how to show mercy to the abject; do thus, each of you who reign in the world"); the theme is literally central to the midmost of the Fables, in which the mouse restates the proverb and the lion learns it (lines 1486–88, 1503–05).

943–46 In Dunbar's The Thistle and the Rose (lines 106–12), the lion is advised to prevent the stronger animals from oppressing the weaker; the messianic prophecy (Isaiah 11:6–7) provides the context for this emblem of ideal peace, which turns out inevitably to be unsustainable.

951–58 Fensit the court. The necessary preliminaries to be undertaken by an officer of the court, "fencing included a demarcation of the bounds of the assembly, a proclamation of its authority and an announcement of the peace of the court"; usually the senior herald, Lyon King of Arms, fenced a new session of Parliament, the highest court in Scotland (Walker, Legal History, pp. 466, 233).

991 gray stude meir. In Odo's version of this tale (Perry 557.638), the absent animal is a donkey, an animal with a reputation for solitariness, stubbornness, and irritability; making the change to the mare, Henryson draws attention to the animal's belonging to a "stud" (enclosure) of horses, a valuable, productive community, the values of which she embodies (lines 1111–17; Fox, ed., p. 231); as a result of the change, her kick will be an altogether weightier, more considered, less merely temperamental, act.

1004 contumax. Despite having insisted on his ignorance in his plea to be excused from the errand of carrying the message to the mare, the fox (like Chaucer's Summoner; CT I[A]639–46) is now keen to show off what command he possesses of legal terminology; still, it is a scrap the lion cannot resist citing later (line 1050).

1013–14 Like the Robert Henryson who graduated from Glasgow University, the wolf is recommended as a venerabilis vir, a "man of age." The fox's gibe about the wolf's expertise has particular relevance to the task at hand: in fifteenth-century Scotland, the chancellor, usually a cleric, kept the great seal, the insignia by which various royal documents were authenticated (Walker, Legal History, p. 138; compare lines 1890n, 2970n).

1031–33 Though these lines may be read as the poet's interjection, they are taken here as part of the fox's rejoinder to the mare; flaunting his scraps of learning and his experience with "scrolls," he is insouciantly in character in saying what suits the moment — only a few moments after he found it prudent to claim to be illiterate. The proverb the fox cites ("Happy are those who take warning from the perils of others") works like a cliché, springing to mind automatically when the circumstances fit: thus the lion will intone it in Scots when he hears about the wolf's discomfiture (line 1065). As for the parenthetical assurance that the message on the scroll is not worth forfeiting (MED forfeten), the price of obedience, five shillings, would be a standard large amount for a poor person (line 1183).

1052 The wolf in the previous fable was also a "doctour of divinitie" (line 666). The joke about the doctoral red cap (the wolf's bloodied head), which is evidently so rich that the fox repeats and the lion echoes it (lines 1061–62), may pertain to the academic costume of non-theology doctors at Glasgow (Fox, ed., p. 247).

1064 greitest clerkis ar not the wysest men. Proverbial. See Whiting C291.

1079 The apparent intersection between aggression and fun with regard to the wolf has just brought the lion and his court to gales of laughter; caught out in his offense against the peace of the court, the fox is left feebly asserting the entertainment value of his attack on the lamb as his justification (compare lines 2558–77).

1089 Treason, an offense to be tried in parliament, was broadly defined in fifteenth-century Scotland; the fox is liable to the charge because he disobeyed the royal command to keep the peace and specifically that "tod Lowrie luke not upoun the lam" (line 945; Walker, Legal History, pp. 305, 527).

1091 In a Scottish court, the sentence would be pronounced, not by the judge, but by the dempster (Walker, Legal History, p. 340).

1101 "[T]he reference to the 'doctouris of devyne' . . . in support of his method rather encourages our scepticism because it reminds us of the vain outwitted Wolf whom the Fox mockingly addresses as 'new-maid doctour off divinitie'" (line 1052; Mehl, "Robert Henryson's Moral Fables," p. 97). On the other hand, given the bruising the profession of "doctouris of devyne" has received in the tale, it may be poetic justice to cede interpretive authority to them.

1102 For apply meaning "apply an allegory or moralization," see MED, ap(p)lien 3.c.

1104–10 Gavin Douglas amplifies this quick survey of a world going mad for profit, Sum wanting one thing, and sum another (Eneados 8.prol.44–52, 92–105). Henryson and Douglas give a satirical edge to an influential scriptural review of trades and crafts, Ecclesiasticus 38:24–31.

1111–17 This stanza and the two ending this Moralitas were subjected to a thoroughgoing Protestant revision in the printed texts; as well, the order of the stanzas may have been changed at an early stage of the textual tradition (Textual Notes, lines 1111–41 passim).

1118–24 Thus moralized, the mare sustains a commitment to a value higher than that of royal command; while taking the higher stakes and her greater integrity into account, she is still to be compared to that altogether smaller being the rural mouse, who surrendered to the blandishments of the burgh, was nearly destroyed, and regained her integrity in returning to her own country (lines 343–56). Though the switch from female to male may distract present-day readers in the equation of contemplative men to the nurturing, independent mare, that animal's strengths typify these men's commitment to interpret the world allegorically, as a penitential wilderness.

1145 The expression "The Talking of the Tod" could be taken to refer to the three tales concerning foxes (The Cock and the Fox, The Fox and the Wolf, and The Trial of the Fox); these three tales stand as a unit even in the Bannatyne Manuscript, where the sequence is otherwise strikingly at odds with that in the prints (Introduction, p. 7, above).


The Sheep and the Dog

Source: Romulus 4 (A. Wright, Fables, pp. 31–33).

1147 One element that distinguishes the present fable from the one to which it appears analogous, the penultimate The Wolf and the Lamb, is that the antagonist is a dog and not a wild predator, is poor and not powerful, and thus should be above dishonesty and oppression; compare the standard character of the loyal dog that Henryson alludes to earlier (line 403).

1148 In fifteenth-century Scotland, the consistory was an ecclesiastical court, usually presided over by the bishop's Official, a canon lawyer; this court had jurisdiction over moral offenses, especially those committed by clerics, but also over a variety of secular offenses. Since the procedure depended heavily on sworn statements, perjury was regarded as an especially damaging offense: "False accusations, if malicious, could give rise to the accusers being charged with defamation" (Walker, Legal History, pp. 405, 542–43).

1160 Making the raven the messenger of the court alludes to his wide reputation for untrustworthiness in such endeavors; sent out for news, the raven failed to return to Noah's Ark (Genesis 8:7; Holland, Buke of the Howlat, line 812).

1166 Perrie (in the Bannatyne Manuscript, Burry) may recall Berrie, one of the widow's dogs in The Cock and the Fox (lines 546–47n).

1174 The fox assumes the function that would have been the responsibility of the historical Robert Henryson, notary public of Dunfermline.

1175–79 The gled, or kite, had a reputation for cowardice and cruelty (Bartholomaeus XII.27, Seymour-Smith, On the Properties of Things, 1:634–35); like the graip, the vulture, it is a scavenger, though it also eats small animals, as in The Paddock and the Mouse (lines 2896–2902); the collusion between these two advocates is only natural.

1189–94 The charge of bias is serious and, if proven, would incur heavy punishment. In Scotland, "[t]he amount of legislation against judicial corruption in the fifteenth century shows how widespread the problem was" (Walker, Legal History, p. 543; also pp. 483–85); compare lines 2657–61, Abbey Walk line 35.

1199 In Scottish legal procedure, if a trial took place on a holiday, in feriate time, the judgment was liable to a parliamentary decree that it was "of no avail, strength, force or effect" (Walker, Legal History, p. 467).

1203–07 According to procedure, if the authority of the court is deemed to be compromised, arbiters were to be appointed by those in authority — the bishop in a case between clerics, the provost and burgh council if between townspeople — and not the parties themselves (Walker, Legal History, p. 181); in any case, one wonders what input the sheep had been able to exert if the two arbiters selected turned out to be the bear and the badger.

1216–17 The legal procedure appears to have shifted from canon to civil law. In Scotland, "civil law" meant Roman law, based on the Code of Justinian (the imperial statutes) and the Digests, principally the three compilations of legal opinions given the force of the law.

1221 The Decrees were the body of Roman law as commented upon by two principal groups of Italian jurists, the glossators and the later commentators, resulting in a weighty array of apparatus, collections of cases, opinions, and interpretations, and summaries, all composing an expanding body of law, the Corpus Juris Civilis. The arbiters are involved in a laborious, potentially endless, scholarly enterprise.

1246 Earlier (line 1157), interdictioun occurred in the context of a church court and refers to being banned from access to certain church sacraments; in the context of civil law, it refers to a prohibition from various kinds of public places and transactions. "By making his readers think of both types of courts," Gray comments, "Henryson is broadening his attack into one on legal injustice in general" (p. 147).

1265–71 Likening the wolf to a powerful sheriff (the king's chief administrator of justice in a county, with large and often sweeping powers of security, war, and taxation) completes the transition from church law to civil, noted above; this transition makes notional sense in a legal system in which the sheriff is bound "to support the church courts." In various counties, the office of the sheriff was inheritable, a tradition not conducive to competence; opportunities were plentiful to exploit the position, and corruption seems, as Henryson indicates, to have been widespread (Walker, Legal History, pp. 333–34).

1269–75 Rather than being associated with inquests as became the practice in England, the medieval Scottish coroner is to be considered a royal officer who summoned those charged with offenses to appear at trial; Henryson depicts the coroner touching the accused person with his wand, his staff of office (DOST wand n. 6). Earlier (line 1160) named as an apparitou, a summoner for a church court, the raven is now (line 1272) identified as the crownair, the coroner of a sheriff court, no less corrupt than the presiding judge.

1279–81 "Henryson informs us that we must wait until later — the second half of the work, as it turns out — to learn the allegorical significance of the Fox and Glede. He does this in a passage which looks both backward and forward in the work" (Roerecke, "Integrity and Symmetry," p. 120, citing lines 2205 and 2431–33 for the fox, and line 2962 for the gleid, the kite).

1286–1320 The stylistic, situational, and thematic strengths of this displaced complaint have been perceptively discussed (e.g., Jamieson, "Poetry," p. 104; Mehl, "Robert Henryson's Moral Fables," pp. 95–96; Wheatley, Mastering Aesop, p. 161). The sheep's mythological reference (Boreas) and his prominently alliterative allusion to the flowers faded by frost refer eloquently to the disorder of the cursit consistorie. His having been "counted as [a] sheep for the slaughter" justifies his quotation of the desperate question that immediately follows that verse, "quhy sleipis thow" (Psalm 43 [44]:22–23); his demand that God "discerne" his "cause" draws polemically on the opening of the previous Psalm ("Iudica me Deus et descerne causam meam a gente non sancta" "Judge me O God and distinguish my cause from the nation that is not holy").

1309–12 Allegory achieves compression (compare lines 237–38): poor people are naked sheep; gentleness, the value of true nobility, is murdered; mercy is exiled.

1314–20 The conclusion to the sheep's complaint involves an austere acceptance of responsibility for suffering (compare Testament line 574, and Prayer for the Pest lines 17–22).


The Lion and the Mouse

The principal source is Romulus 18 (A. Wright, Fables, pp. 58–61). "The opening section of the fable is apparently original, though of course the [devices and gambits] are all traditional" (Fox, ed., p. 263).

1321–27 The kingly associations of this Chaucerian stanza, brilliant in themselves, have been prepared for by the linking of the lion to the season and the scene, in The Trial of the Fox (lines 866–72n); they further prepare for the arrival of the "imperious" Aesop (Machan, Textual Criticism, p. 129) and his evocation and subsequent moralization of the kingly pleasant place in the tale proper (lines 1346–47, 1408, 1580n; compare Eneados 13.prol.1–88).

1349–60 David Laing speculated that Henryson's description of Aesop "might in some measure be applicable to himself" (Poems and Fables, p. xi; compare line 1373, "In civile law studyit"; also line 1384, "my maister venerabill"; Introduction, above), a speculation analogous to that of Aesop as "an image not of the Other but of the writerly Self in an ideally productive, famous form" (Patterson, Fables of Pwer, p. 32); in this regard, Aesop is to be compared with Henryson's witty portrait of the planetary god Mercury in the Testament (see especially lines 239, 242). A prominent article of Aesop's clothing is the camel's hair "chimar," (a loose, short robe) which is dyed a deep purple; the unusual color recalls the violets mentioned only a few lines earlier, but also Aesop's own purpurat verse style as evoked in the opening Prologue (lines 58, 1335).

1363–69 In spite of the stanza's abundant indications of paternal benevolence (sitting down beside the dreamer) and filial regard (the reverent mode of address), Henryson diplomatically asks his "gude maister" to identify himself, as if aware of the needs of his own audience even in the midst of his dream.

1370–74 Aesop's noble descent, Roman birth "withoutin nay," university education in civil law, and eternal salvation in heaven all contrast with the depiction in the printed Aesop of the author as a "dyfformed and evylle shapen" churl, unschooled but with a surprisingly "grete wytte" (Caxton fol. ii), a depiction reflected, for example, in the image of Aesop "the Phrygian" that is used in the frontispiece to the Bassandyne print of Henryson's Fables. Aesop is also a Roman "poyet laureate" for John Lydgate (Isopes Fabules, lines 8–14). The "cunning" clerk who appears earlier in the Fables is the wolf in The Trial of the Fox (lines 998, 1026).

1398–1403 "[T]aillis may lytill succour mak" in a corrupted world (line 1397), but with the most delicate courtesy, the dreamer can still persuade the laureate author to provide one more fable, in the hope that this one listener may yet carry away something that will help "heirefter"; as in his request for a curriculum vitae from Aesop, he is playing at being his own ideal reader — and, by implication, is assuring that reader that receiving and keeping the kernel of the fable may help mightily hereafter.

1431–46 "[T]he pleas of the mouse . . . deploy in small compass and with great felicity every possible argument to excuse the impertinence of the mice. In this stanza the disciplines of rhetoric and the bar combine to yield a delectably lively economy of utterance, clinched by the typically decisive final rhyme" (Burrow, "Dunbar," p. 115).

1449–53 The image of authority deserves the same respect as the person; on the one hand, the lion upholds the principle of the awe that should be shown to images of royalty; on the other, he cannot help implying that all authority is like a stuffed lionskin.

1460 On the punishment decreed for treason, see line 2634n.

1461–66 The central stanza of the forty-three comprising The Lion and the Mouse has at its center the appeal to the king to "mak thy mynd to mercy inclinate" (Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance, p. 198); the same emphasis occurs in the central line of the entire Fables, line 1488, the completion of a sentence recapitulating the proverb "Parcere prostratis scit nobilis ira leonis" (line 928n).

1475–78 Following Romulus, Henryson alludes to a classical triumph, "in which the honour gained by the victorious triumphator depends on the prestige of the captives who are displayed in his procession" (Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance, p. 198; compare Shakespeare, Julius Caesar 1.1.37–39). The mouse's point is that honor arises from the indomitability of one's adversary and does not redound to the victor who kills those who have surrendered to him.

1493 The mouse is reckoned scripturally among the unclean beasts (Leviticus 11:29).

1525 The "Quhyle . . . quhyle" pattern reduces the lion to a plight like those experienced by two mice in the Fables: the rural mouse in the paws of the cat, and the mouse struggling to keep afloat while tied to a frog (331–33n, 2929ff.n; compare 166ff.n).

1531–41 The lion gives vent to a formal complaint rhetorically and even verbally akin to those uttered by Cresseid (Testament, lines 407–10) and Orpheus (Orpheus, lines 134–83).

1558 The mice calling their female leader "brother" has perplexed Henryson's editors, who have adduced the demands of rhyme for explanation; still, the word may pertain to any fellow Christian, fellow member of a religious order or guild, or close friend (MED brother 3, 4); given the emphasis elsewhere in the Fables on members of religious communities protecting and correcting wayward secular authority (lines 991, 1118–24, 1616–19), the arresting detail of the possible sex-change demands the reader's attention.

1559–63 These mere rural mice are equipped and willing to get a king out of an insoluble bind; they are to be contrasted to the burgh mouse with her sensitive teeth (line 223n) and perhaps compared to the moralization on the mare whose duties are not to be disturbed by royal command (lines 1118–24n).

1566–69 Aesop's immediate conclusion is that the king's safety depends on the principle that the bestowal of mercy instills loyalty; the dreamer's request for "ane moralitie / In this fabill" does not indicate his obtuseness but rather his desire for a fuller explication of the signification of each of the narrative elements.

1573–79 Though this stanza has been taken to refer to James III (e.g., Nicholson, Scotland, pp. 500–20), it is couched in general terms. Henryson's accusation of sleuth does stick, however: rarely calling parliaments outside Edinburgh, James was unprecedentedly sedentary; he earned opposition by his sale of remissions to people convicted of robbery and murder (Walker, Legal History, p. 190; Macdougall, James III, pp. 160–80; Wormald, Court, pp. 10–12).

1580 Aesop is teaching the dreamer, and thus the reader, to interpret such seasonally "lowne and le" landscapes as allegories of mutability (compare lines 1321–27n).

1598–1600 The point of this textually complex passage (Textual Notes, line 1599n) is that by showing mercy, lords set an example for those "of small degree," so that the social damage and disruption involved in the retaliatory violence of the bloodfeud can be avoided through the kin offering and accepting kinbute (financial compensation for manslaughter or injury; DOST kinbut); as the master shows mercy and reason, so does the man. In fifteenth-century Scotland, kinbute is a traditional way of averting full-scale bloodfeud: it involves "the acceptance by the kin [of the person killed] of pecuniary compensation," analogous to wergild in Anglo-Saxon England. Still, kinbuit was a term "used more generally, for compensation for other kinds of losses" (Walker, Legal History, p. 616; Acts of the Parliament of Scotland 2.3.7 [1424]).

1608–11 Though generally skeptical about specific political allegory in this fable, Gray comments that this stanza "strongly suggests a veiled reference to some well-known contemporary event . . . the generalizing 'oftymes hes bene sene' may suggest to some that it is a deliberate piece of mystification" (p. 143).

1615–19 Aesop assigns the dreamer a task to persuade, not the lords to be loyal to the king, but the kirkmen to pray that the lords remain loyal; it is a line of approach that suits a poet based in an ecclesiastical center like Dunfermline; such a poem properly addresses and instructs politically responsible churchmen.

1618 In 1482, a band of lords captured James III at Lauder. McKenna reviews the debate over whether this reference to unfaithful lords may allude to that event ("Legends of James III").


The Preaching of the Swallow

The principal source is Romulus 20 (A. Wright, Fables, pp. 63–65). Henryson adapts "his source markedly — adding new forms (the chanson d'aventure, the debate, the preaching), expanding the tale ('realistic' detail), omitting an incident that does not suit his purpose (the Swallow does not live with the Fowler)" (Jamieson, "Poetry," pp. 162–63).

1623–42 Studying the language and style of this passage, Jeremy J. Smith notes that it can exemplify the value of French terms to denote ethical and religious concepts (prudence, mervelous, profound, omnipotent, perfyte, ingenious), and "a marked tendency to adopt the characteristically French post-modifying adjective construction, even when a Germanic word is used as the headword: wirking mervelous." These stanzas exemplify Henryson's philosophical style, to be contrasted to the courtly manner in which the preceding fable began (lines 1321–27n) by its more "complex syntax, flagged by subordinating conjunctions and non-finite verb phrases acting as the predicators of subordinate clauses" ("Language of Older Scots Poetry," pp. 205–06).

1626–28 "[P]rudence, according to an ancient and widely received tradition, consists precisely in the ability to hold in mind not merely the present time, but also the past and the future" (Burrow, "Preaching," p. 154). The emphasis on the instantaneous divine perception of time is Boethian (Consolation 5.pr6).

1629 "The logic of Henryson's 'thairfoir' is that the 'presoun corporall' is a limitation placing man far beneath a God 'sa perfyte and sa ingenious'" (Schrader, "Henryson and Nominalism," p. 7; compare Eneados 10.prol.86–95); the furthest the shackled mind can go towards understanding divine wisdom, perhaps, is to employ fictional analogies drawn from creation, what Douglas calls "rude exemplys and figuris" (Eneados 10.prol.83), thereby making a virtue of necessity.

1636–40 The Aristotelean comparison between human reason and the weak eyesight of a noctural animal in the daylight (Metaphysics 2.1.3; compare 204n) here becomes elaborated into a miniature figure replete with naturalistic and regional detail; Henryson complicates the figure by having the bat venture forth in the gloming, in the vestiges of daylight, not quite in the nocturnal realm of fantasie. From another perspective, "The illusory 'reality' of the natural world prevents our seeing the true realities of God manifest in it" (Burrow, English Verse, p. 325).

1650–51 To illustrate the tradition from which Henryson derives his compensatory assurance that creation offers ways to perceive God's qualities, "the eclectic Sentences of Peter Lombard" have been cited ("For from the continuity of creatures the Maker is known to be eternal, from the greatness of creatures omnipotent, from order and arrangement wise, from governance good," 4.1.3.101.36, qtd. and trans. Schrader, "Henryson and Nominalism," p. 11).

1657–60 The firmament "represents the furthest limit of human perception" and the nearest approach to divine perfection. Concentric below it, the "spheres" — Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the sun, Venus, Mercury, the moon, all in their fixed paths — revolve around the earth. "All eight spheres are carried each day through one complete revolution from East to West by the Primum mobile, which contains them all, although their own proper motions are from West to East" (Burrow, English Verse, p. 326). From the "chirkinge of the mevinge of the cerclis and of roundnesse of hevene . . . cometh most swete melodye and acorde" (Bartholomaeus VIII.17, Seymour-Smith, On the Properties of Things, 1:493); Henryson returns to the theme of this music in Orpheus (lines 218–39n), though he avoids mentioning it in the darker cosmology of the Testament.

1661 The descent and consequent degradation of order is inscribed in the descending sequence of the four elements, "since the movement of the passage is from God to man" (Fox, ed., p. 278); compare Testament, line 147n.

1663 Glimpsed thus, God perfects the author function, a connection that the theologian Hugh of St. Victor characterized thus: "the whole world which is knowne by sence is as it were a booke written with the fynger of God . . . and every the creatures be as it were certaine letters . . . ordeyned by the judgement of God, to make knowne, and as it were after a certaine maner to signify the invysible wisdome of God" (Patrologia Latina 176.814; sixteenth-century English trans. qtd. Gray, p. 125).

1671–74 In a passage abounding with commonplace scriptural echoes, these lines make especially prominent and explicit allusions to Wisdom 9:2 (God "fitted human beings to rule the creatures") and 11:20 (God "ordered all things by measure, number, and weight"), the latter "a key text in medieval cosmology" (Burrow, English Verse, p. 327n53); at the virtual nadir of the descent of meaning and order, humanity is also depicted as its focus.

1675 Attention shifts toward order in seasonal time; Boethius is an important source for the concept that the cycle of the seasons exemplifies divine benevolence (Consolation 4.m4).

1692–1705 In the Prologue to Book 7 of his Eneados, Douglas responds enthusiastically to Henryson's set-piece descriptions of the onset of winter, here and in lines 1832–38: see, for example, Douglas' variation on the topic of the stripping of the leaves:

The grond stud barrant, widderit, dosk or gray,      Herbis, flowris and gersis wallowyt away. Woddis, forestis, with nakyt bewis blowt, Stude stripyt of thar weid in every howt. (Eneados 7.prol.63–66)

barren, withered, dark grasses faded bare, barren branches Stood stripped; garments; forest

Of Aeolus, god of the winds, Priscilla Bawcutt comments that "[i]n Scottish tradition he absorbs the character of Boreas, the north wind" (Poems of William Dunbar, 2:397).

1697–98 The detail of the birds' mourning in winter foreshadows the events of the fable (lines 1836–38); compare the winter scene in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in which the knight is "Ner slayn wyth the slete" and "mony bryddez unblythe upon bare twyges . . . pitosly ther piped for pyne of the colde" (lines 729; 746–47). Gower, by comparison, couches the effects of seasonal change on avian behavior in terms of the myth of Philomela, the bare trees of winter intensifying the shamed nightingale's wish to hide (CA 5.5946–53; compare lines 1832–38). Douglas amplifies this detail in his description of winter:

Smale byrdis, flokkand throu thik ronys thrang
In chyrmyng and with cheping changit thar sang
Sekand hidlis and hyrnys thame to hyde
Fra feirfull thuddis of the tempestuus tyde
(Eneados 7.prol.69–72)

[Small birds, flocking through thickly overgrown bushes
Into chirping and cheeping change their song
Seeking hiding-places and nooks to hide themselves
From terrifying gusts of the stormy season]

1707–08 The depiction of spring as the servant of summer is an original twist on the personification of the seasons: as the chief servitor and representative, spring bears the official insignia and thus ensures everything is ready for the arrival of his lord the summer (line 1681); still, Henryson draws back from too close an association between the increasingly pleasant scene and the theme usually associated with it, of kingship (compare 1321–27n): to see the clay underneath the wild columbine is to recognize that this is not the courtly pleasant place (lines 1713–19n).

1710–11 "The small birds of the vivid descriptio of spring take their place in the spring opening of the story, to become later [line 1730 and following] its chief actors. The same spring which is the last of one series of seasons becomes the first of another" (Burrow, "Preaching," p. 153). The passage bears comparison with the depiction of the birds in the Prologue to Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, except that Chaucer's birds anticipate the fate still in store for Henryson's:

The smale foules, of the sesoun fayn, That from the panter and the net ben scaped,      Upon the fouler, that hem made awhaped In wynter, and distroyed hadde hire brood, In his dispit, hem thoghte yt did hem good To synge of hym, and in hir song despise The foule cherl that, for his coveytise, Had hem betrayed with his sophistrye. (F Prol.130–37)

snare terrified deception

1713 Echoes of the Prologue to Langland's Piers Plowman cluster in this fable, here to the opening line, "In a somer seson, whan softe was the sonne"; see also line 1775 (compare Piers Plowman Prol.6, "Me bifel a ferly, of Fairye me thoghte"; Burrow, English Verse, p. 332n153–4).

1713–19 The poet's motives contrast with those that impel Amans into the wood at the outset of CA, "Noght for to singe with the briddes" (1.111) but to lament his misfortune in love. Like the figure of the poet in Chaucer's Prologue to the Legend of Good Women (G 40–50), Henryson's visitor to the springtime scene wants to hear the birds and see the flowers and "the soill that wes richt sessonabill," a collocation that, like the "clay" previously (lines 1707–08n), recalls the trope in the Prologue of the soil as the ground for the text (lines 8–14n).

1725 Those "that luifit corne" include both birds and farmers; in the hard world of this fable, that shared love does not draw them into harmony but pits them in competition.

1729 Typically shrubby, its blossoms an early sign of spring, the hawthorn tree provides cover in several Middle English and Middle Scots poems to observe unusual goings-on undetected (e.g., Winner and Wastoure, line 36; Dunbar, Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo, line 14). Gray comments on the "magical reputation of the tree" (p. 89n19).

1734 Associations between swallows and prophecy were available to Henryson (Isidore, Etymologiae, XII.vii.70, p. 268; Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale 16.97.1213, qtd. Hill, "Hirundines Habent Prescium," p. 30). In scholastic commentaries on Romulus, the swallow is commonly interpreted to be a preacher (Wheatley, Mastering Aesop, p. 169). In her exhortation to her flock to work the soil for their own future well-being (line 1750), the swallow, like the poet (lines 8–14n), is also a teacher.

1741 Henryson infuses significance into varieties of laughter: often, as here, a laugh or derisive chuckle bespeaks an assumption of superiority and a lowering of one's guard — a spontaneously revealed failure to recognize what is at stake (e.g., lines 446, 684, 1054; compare line 2329); compare line 1558n.

1754 Disticha Catonis 2.24: "Prospice qui veniant, hos casus esse ferendos; / Nam levius laedit, quidquid praevidimus ante." The swallow has already provided a translation (lines 1738–40). Burrow comments that this maxim "stands at the mathematical centre of the poem . . . excluding the Moralitas. . . . Perhaps it was Henryson's custom, when expounding this passage of [Romulus] in the school at Dunfermline, to use the parallel with Cato as a way of introducing discussion of the fable's moral significance" ("Preaching," pp. 157–58).

1755–58 The passage, as Schrader points out, is strongly Boethian (Consolation 2.pr1, qtd. Fox, ed., p. 282). Burrow translates lines 1757–58 thus: "But prudence is an interior process of reasoning (?) which makes a man foresee in advance and observe" (English Verse, p. 331n136–7).

1763 As Burrow notes, most of these proverbs will come to pass in ways that lead to the destruction of the lark and her fellows (English Verse, p. 332).

1825–31 The fowler and his wife follow an ancient procedure in the making of flax (Fox, ed., pp. 283–84). The pods are raked off at the outset in order to harvest the seeds for oil and planting. While many medieval flax-makers retted the stalks in troughs, the burn is convenient for the purpose here. The stalks are then beaten, scraped and raked to extract the fibers, which are spun into thread. The documentary realism of this passage, conveyed by a poet who seems entirely conversant with the activity he is summarizing, forms a precedent for the authenticity in the depiction of rural life in the next two fables, as for instance the description of ploughing in The Fox, the Wolf, and the Husbandman (lines 2233–43n).

1846–50 Roerecke contrasts the birds' scraping to the ignorant rooster's search for food in the first fable ("Integrity and Symmetry," pp. 92–96); unlike the rooster, the flock has been taught to read the signs; these birds' "persistence in error, then, is obviously perverse and thus the more blameable" (p. 110).

1887 The abruptness may pertain to the violent catastrophe, after which a return to the consolatory mode of the prologue to the fable would been ill-advised (McKenna, Henryson's Tragic Vision, p. 189).

1890 Work that is autentik is of enduring importance (DOST); it involves truth unadorned by a surface of fiction; compare lines 1013 and 2971–72 for the further possibility that the purveyors of such authenticity are not always to be trusted.

1897 The devil is often depicted as a fowler, and not least when a bird is speaking: Dunbar's blackbird advises "every man that he / With lufe nocht in the feindis net be tone" (Bawcutt, Poems of William Dunbar, poem 24, lines 101–02; compare Chaucer, Legend of Good Women F Prol.130–37, qtd. lines 1710–11n). Of particular relevance in the comparison is the depiction of the devil as sower of tares (compare lines 366–70; Matthew 12:25), but the reference to the devil as a fallen angel (compare lines 596–99) conveys a motive of particular envy for the birds, which are still blessed with the capacity to fly upwards.

1902–08 By the fifteenth century, the analysis of the process of sin into three parts was conventional; compare Chaucer's Parson's Tale: "deedly synne hath, first, suggestion of the feend . . . and afterward, the delit of the flessh . . . and after that the consentynge of resoun" (CT X[I]330–35).

1904 Note the antitype here to the sprouts of knowledge and eloquence in the Prologue to the Fables (lines 10–12n).

1908 As elsewhere in the Fables, the moral implications of human behavior cause fact and fiction to converge: habit likens humanity to the brutall beistis (line 397; compare lines 54–56, 215–17; see also 786–88n).

1921 The ungodly are conventionally compared to chaff or dust in the wind (e.g., Psalms 1:4, 35:5); adjacent to one such comparison is a no less relevant analogy between ephemerality and the flight of a bird (Wisdom 5:14; compare 5:10).

1932 The memorably grisly image of the grave as the worms' kitchen neatly achieves an inversion of worldly values: it is a mark of social distinction to be served from a kitchen.

1949 Fellowship with the angels in heaven articulates a factor to the delight of this fable: the energetic flight of the birds draws out the more fiendish aspects of the fowler's hatred for them (line 1897n).


The Fox, the Wolf, and the Cadger

Arthur Richard Diebler identified a source for this fable to be Roman de Renart, branche 14, episode 10 (Henrisone's Fabeldichtungen, pp. 65–68). Henryson appears to have been especially inventive here; his "account merely follows the outlines of the story" (Jamieson, "Poetry," 242–43). Agreeing that the two versions resemble each other only slightly, Fox speculates that "Henryson may well have known an oral version" (ed., p. 289).

1955 Anger is the element in which the characters of this fable operate: the wolf, who is its principal exponent at the outset, seems to pass it to the fox, who takes offense at having to swear an oath of loyalty (line 2023); and by stealing the fish and then cursing his victim, the fox passes it along to the cadger (line 2098); it is not until the penultimate fable, The Wolf and the Lamb, that the wolf again becomes chiefly identified by wrath. The association between rage and wind present in breith returns in the simile for the cadger's anger, "wraith as ony wind" (line 2168; compare Dunbar, "I maister Andro Kennedy," line 26).

1956 The alliterative collocation "feud or favor" recurs in Scots, most early in official documents (DOST fede, n.1c; compare 2165).

1962 Elsewhere in the Fables, foxes are called Lowrence or Lowrie (429n); here, the name Russell appears for the only time in the work (compare CT VII[B²]3334). The wolf may be making a clumsy pun on the expression russat gray, meaning "undyed homespun cloth" (line 679, Orpheus line 158), in which case he is alluding to the fox's comparative poverty; or he may be using russel, meaning "red thing" (MED russel, n.a; DOST russell, 2n), as in "you gray red thing"; if so, this is the first of several references to actual or supposed characteristics of the animal (compare lines 1982n, 1991, 2001) — the fox tends to have a silver-gray cast to the fur on its haunches and under its tail.

1966–68 As steward, the fox is to be the wolf's chief executive officer, though the term can be used, as in England, to refer to a household administrator responsible for provisions. The term also has high political associations, the Stewart of Scotland being the "officer of state next after the king," and, since Robert II, a title of the king's eldest son (DOST stewart). The parodic usage of the term is compounded by the fox's reluctance; he is compelled to take his place as a tricky servitor, not, as in The Cock and the Fox, as an outcome of his flattery, but at the insistence of the wolf; strategically or not, Lowrence plays hard to get.

1967 The expression "knap doun caponis" recalls a line from the Scots burlesque romance Rauf Coilyear, "Knap doun capounis of the best, but in the byre" ("Knock down some of the best capons out in the barn," line 111); perhaps the wolf is being associated in passing with the boorish, overbearing hero of that romance, who is calling for the capons; the echoic knap begins a sequence of vividly rendered sounds in this fable: swak (lines 2076, 2146), swakkit (line 2081), trimmillit (line 2098), hakkit (line 2103), battis (line 2182), dungin (line 2196).

1982 Foxes are notorious for their odor, emitted from glands under the tale and on the feet; again, as with the verbal echoing of sounds noted above (line 1967n), the representation of the keen sensory apprehension of the world, this time through smell, conveys both danger and desire; compare line 2030.

1997 This is one of several instances in the Fables in which a proverb rebounds upon its user (e.g., lines 102n, 1031–33n, 1763n, 2063–69n). See Whiting F49.

2000–06 The fox's disinclination to fish makes an allusion to The Fox and the Wolf, in another situation in which penance is required and dodged (lines 719–21); the fox in that fable was killed, which may suggest that chronology has not been maintained — or, more significantly, that all foxes are the same in regard to penance and fishing. MacQueen notes the relation between the numerical structure of the fable and the season of Lent: forty stanzas for forty days ("Lent" p. 117; compare line 248n and lines 2034, 2120, 2153).

2002 The size of a minnow, the stickleback has spines on its back and armor plates on its sides; it would not make an appetizing morsel for a fox, let alone a wolf.

2010 Bawcutt translates the line thus: "You expect to manipulate me, playing with me as if I were a cat that would chase a straw" (Poems of William Dunbar, 2:364).

2021–22 "The additional oath of loyalty demanded by the Wolf is particularly relevant to fifteenth-century Scottish circumstances; in effect it is a bond of manrent" (MacQueen, "Lent," p. 115); on such bonds between lords and servitors, see lines 438–40n.

2025–27 "Errour of naciouns and feynynges of poetis menen that Jubiter was highest fadir of goddis" (Bartholomaeus VIII.12, Seymour-Smith, On the Properties of Things, 1:480); to swear by Jupiter is to swear falsely; compare lines 2869–71.

2028 The spelling cadgear is typical of late sixteenth-century MSc orthography; the spellings current in the 1490s are cagger, kegger. Henryson's is the earliest use of the word in Scots (DOST, cadge(a)r, cage(a)r).

2042 In English, the pejorative significance of pelf is taken to emerge in the sixteenth century (OED pelf, n); In "Abbey Walk" the expression "warldlie pelf" (line 51) is used with such a connotation, which may be an indication of the poem's having been written by someone other than Henryson. Here, the fox means it to refer admiringly and avidly to prospectively stolen goods.

2045 not worth ane fle. Proverbial. See Whiting F263. Compare Fables, line 2286.

2046 Bawcutt and Riddy note "a subdued irony, since the bee is usually a type of honest industry" (Longer Scottish Poems, p. 364).

2052–55 The "unliklie" posture of the fox playing dead inspires the cadger to dance his grotesque little jig of triumph (lines 2060–62); the exchange of emotions and sensory experiences, noted above as a narrative technique in this fable (lines 1967n, 1982n) appears to be realized in an exchange of distorted gestures, which in turn will ensnare the wolf (lines 2161–67); the sequence represents a development of the technique employed in the depiction of the exaggerated pose the fox urges on Chantecleir (lines 462–80) and of the languorous loll affected by the fox himself just before he is shot (757–60n).

2063–69 The mishandling of proverbs indicates the supreme readiness of the speaker for a comeuppance (e.g., 1997n): the cadger mangles two sayings in rapid succession: the devil seldom lies dead in a ditch and the fox prospers when the farmer's wife curses him (Fox, ed., p. 293; Bawcutt and Riddy, Longer Scottish Poems, p. 364).

2074 Though not as economically important as wool, hides were a staple of Scottish trade with Flanders (Whyte, Scotland before the Industrial Revolution, pp. 59, 73–74).

2083 The rousing morning song "Hunt's up" was being sung in England in the early sixteenth century (OED hunt's-up); Henryson's is the earliest reference, though, as in English, there are several occurrences in sixteenth-century Scots (DOST hunt n.1.b). The word hunt to refer to the pursuit rather than the pursuer is earliest attested in Scots, although a strikingly early English example appears in Chaucer (CT I[A]2628).

2089 The word nekhering has two meanings in Scots: a heavy hit to the nape of the neck (a translation of the Latin colaphus) and a kind of herring, the shad (Latin collacus; DOST nekhering).

2127 The appeal to the senses produces a redolent line: callour is an adjective applied to fine salmon in which the flesh is richly flecked with jellied fat (MED calver; compare OED calver a. and v.); the simile of the partridge's eye "might be used appropriately to describe the glistening skin of a fresh-caught salmon" (Fox, ed., p. 296). The key to all this distracting vividness of sensory appeal is that it is entirely a ruse — the fox is conjuring up a fantasy fish for the greedily willful wolf.

2154 In principio, "In the beginning," the opening words of both Genesis and the Gospel of John, used as a greeting by begging friars and as a charm (CT I(A)254; Bloomfield, "Magic of In Principio," pp. 559–65). This detail of satire against the friars reverses the roles played in The Fox and the Wolf.

2189–90 The proverb is borne out by the wolf's comeuppance but not by the fox's success; the discrepancy is resolved in the Moralitas, in which the fox is the supreme trickster, the world (line 2205; compare lines 2063–69n).

2228 The proverb (Whiting P421, 423) clinches the sensory appeal and its disastrous frustration traced in the language and narrative structure of the fable: lured by the worldly fox, the wolf and the cadger have proceeded without perception and have come to confusion.


The Fox, the Wolf, and the Husbandman

A source for this fable has been identified in Steinhöwel's Esopus (8.10; Lyall, "Henryson's Moral Fabillis," p. 375) or one of its translations; in Steinhöwel, this is the tenth in a series of in twelve fables derived from a widely-distributed compilation, the Disciplina Clericalis of Petrus Alfonsi. Fox adds that "the greater part of Henryson's version is original: it is only the bare bones of the plot and a few details which can be parallelled in the earlier works" (ed., p. 300).

2233–43 The documentary precision of this description of ploughing with oxen creates the impression of a strong contrast with the preceding fable with its dizzying sensory appeal; looking back across that tale of illusion, this opening recalls the description of flax-making in The Preaching of the Swallow (lines 1825–31n).

2234 "Streiking tyme" ("ploughing time") is ambiguous: this could be autumn (as soon as late August), early winter, or early spring; the simile of the angry hare (line 2242n) may imply the latter. However, if the fox's vision of a "somer cheis" (line 2355) indicates the freshness of the item, the autumn would make better sense.

2235, 2241 The ploughman's view of the furrow contrasts with that of the burgh mouse, toiling "Fra fur to fur" in search of her sister (line 185).

2237 The ploughman's religious interjection Benedicité deserves comparison with the earlier misuse of this holy greeting (line 693n). Perhaps the world of this fable is not so far after all from one in which a wolf in friar's clothing blesses a possibly penitent fox, or in which a supposedly solicitous fox utters In principio as a charm to avert bad luck (line 2154n). The opening realism may be nothing but a ruse; after all, the complete hoax of the big cheese lies ahead.

2242 The Scots proverbial depiction of the hare as an epitome of anger corresponds to the expression more usual in English, "mad as a March hare" (Fox, ed., p. 301).

2246 Compared to Steinhöwel and Petrus Alfonsi, in both of which versions the fox is a latecomer to the dispute, here the fox is at the center of the scene from the outset; "it is Lowrence who instigates the action, encouraging the Wolf to take the Husbandman's cursing of his oxen seriously" (Lyall, "Henryson's Moral Fabillis," p. 366); the same decisive shift of focus toward the fox occurs when he volunteers to judge the dispute (line 2310).

2251 The wolf will treat the plowman's words as if they were as binding as a king's verbum or judgment (Hill, "Stet Verbum Regis," p. 129), a position made valid by the medieval perception that "the mental faculty most readily associated with promises was not intention but will"; in other words, "one was felt to be answerable for the performative power of one's own words even when one had no intention of making them perform anything" (Green, Crisis of Truth, pp. 310, 312). An outcome of the wolf's position is that the plowman is placed on equal footing with the sovereign in terms of the weight of his utterances; a moral lesson about controlling one's speech is implicit, but so is a political one about the responsibilities shared by individuals at all ranks in society. In effect, integrity is true nobility; compare Testament, lines 551–53n.

2253–54 At this point, Henryson's phrasing resembles that found in several versions of Steinhöwel's Esopus, Caxton's among them: "And whanne the nyght was come / the labourer vnbonde his oxen / and lete them goo to his hows / And thenne whanne the wulf sawe them comynge homeward . . ." (Lenaghan, Caxton's Aesop, p. 206; qtd. Lyall, "Henryson's Moral Fabillis," p. 367).

2255 The wolf is depicted with a limp; with Henryson's depiction of the "hirpilland hair" in mind (line 903n), one might suppose that the wolf is ready to be "angrie as ane hair," as the plowman was previously (line 2242n); but more likely this awkward pace indicates his hesitancy to approach the man, even now that the hour is "weill lait" (line 2253); the same can be said for the lourand approach of the fox when he emerges from cover (line 2294).

2259 Gray comments that "We feel no more surprised when the wolf accosts the husbandman . . . than we do in the ballad when Thomas the Rhymer meets the Queen of fair Elfland. This is the result of a confident and consummate skill in narrative art" (p. 82).

2270 The plank, a coin of small value, was first minted in Scotland about 1470 (DOST plak, n.). The occurrence of the word offers evidence of a date after which the fable was written or at least revised; compare the date of publication of the Aesopic tradition likeliest to have provided its source — Steinhöwel (1476–77), translated into French by Macho (1480), translated in turn into English by Caxton (1483–84).

2280–83 Again (compare line 2251n) the wolf insists on the fundamental parity between the word of a lord and that of a farmer.

2285–86 But lawte . . . nocht worth ane fle. Proverbial. See Whiting F263. Compare Fables, line 2045.

2329 In the role of a judge, Lowrence exemplifies the corruption of the office depicted in The Sheep and the Dog (line 1265n); see also line 1741n on the possible significance of the fox's laugh.

2332 Lowrence's allusion to the scriptural theme of the sleep of God underscores the relation between the present parody of judicial procedure and that which is featured in The Sheep and the Dog, in the Moralitas to which it was the suffering victim who cried out "O lord, quhy sleipis thow sa lang?" (lines 1286–1320n). Now the sleep of God is complacently assumed by the wicked.

2335 The Wife of Bath also uses this proverb (CT III[D]415).

2346 To rave "unrocked" is to act wildly without provocation (DOST rok v.). In The Testament of the Papyngo, Lyndsay uses the phrase in a Henrysonian dialogue between scavenging birds (line 969). The repeated association between the expression and lowlife characters suggests that it is markedly coarse, a quality Henryson sharpens by Lowrence's uttering it in the same breath as a blasphemous oath (OED rock v1.6a; DOST rok v. 2; compare Orpheus line 284).

2362 The comparison between the worthless outcome of further dispute and a withered turnip has its counterpoise in a cheese promised to be "Quhyte as ane neip" ("white as a turnip," line 2395), especially when that cheese is later moralized as the vice of covetousness (line 2448).

2392 Though the expression "shadow of the moon" has been taken as evidence that Henryson had read Caxton's version of the fable (Jamieson, "Poetry," p. 257; MacQueen, Robert Henryson, p. 219), the word schadow is "Henryson's normal term for 'reflection', or 'reflected image' (compare Testament, line 348)" (Fox, ed., p. 306).

2408 As in the preceding fable, the fox lures the wolf into the final stage of the trick by appealing to his superior strength (compare lines 2124–25).

2418–19 The question whether Henryson copied "if one goes up, the other must come down" from Caxton can be answered by noting that this proverb is widely distributed by the late fifteenth century and would have occurred to more than one reteller of this fable (Whiting B575).

2427–30 As noted above (line 1955n), Henryson gives much more prominence to the wicked oppression of the wolf in his version of The Wolf and the Lamb (Wheatley, Mastering Aesop, p. 183).

2437–39 Scholars have often expressed perplexity with the apparent arbitrariness of the interpretations offered in this Moralitas. Foremost among the problematic details is the identification of the hens with the good works by which a medieval Christian avoids falling into the devil's clutches. Kratzmann regards the topic of the hens as "ridiculously far-fetched," speculates about its "playful mockery," and, relenting, concludes that "Henryson manages to have it both ways, and to give the game a serious edge" ("Henryson's Fables," p. 67; for further comment, see Lyall, "Henryson's Moral Fabillis" p. 371). Jamieson speculates that Protestant revision has been so extensive that it is not even "certain that we have Henryson's own moralitas to this fable," at least in regard to specific details ("Poetry," p. 272). Wheatley is less disturbed by the hens: "Much ink has been spent deriding the allegory of the hens as good deeds; scholastic commentators recurrently gloss various characters in fables thus" (Mastering Aesop, p. 184).


The Wolf and the Wether

Steinhöwel's Esopus and its translations contain the source for this fable (5.15; Perry no. 703).

2465 The simile is a conventional indication of the pallor and gauntness of grief (Orpheus, line 350; DOST wed(e n.2).

2471 The shepherd's lament may have burlesque associations: darling is a word typical of love and marriage, as when Troilus mourns Cresseid, "sumtyme his awin darling" (Testament, line 504) or Pertok bewails the loss of Chantecleir, "our drowrie and our dayis darling" (line 497).

2472–73 The decision to leave home and wander into the countryside has penitential undertones; compare the burgh mouse going to visit her sister (lines 180–87).

2475 The verb schute establishes the threat of deadly violence (DOST s(c)hute v.1.b) but later (line 2567) signals the success of coarse humor in reversing that threat.

2480–89 "[T]he sheep disguised in a dog's skin is a living and comic image of the meaning hidden within the deceptive outer form of fiction" (Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance, p. 194; compare lines 15–16n); it is also a reminder of the assertion made by the lion in The Lion and the Mouse, that the image of power — a skin stuffed with straw — should be honored as much as the powerful person whose image it represents (lines 1449–53n); in the recurrence of the theme, Henryson is not far from King Lear's dog in office.

2495 The collocation "wanton of his weed" may appear to suggest that the ram becomes self-indulgent or extravagant because of his new clothes; more likely, this is an early example of the word to refer to insolence or even mercilessness (OED wanton a.4b. compare 5a.; MED wantoun a, b); his declared lack of fear for the wolf reveals that his appearance has made a fool of him already.

2518–25 Alliteration and "carefully chosen visual details" heighten the rendering of violent action (Gray, p. 106); the passage deserves comparison with the description of an earlier dog-chase (lines 551–53n).

2537 In the landscape of the chase, the rekill appears to mark a boundary between farmland and wilderness; the peats would be stacked after being dug out from the bog (lines 827–28n). Now the chase is in the wolf's territory.

2555–56 The topic of mingled play and earnest, which now gains prominence in the final stages of the narration (lines 2558, 2560, 2564, 2577, 2583) is initiated by the wolf; he sees the game as an instrument of scorne that will lower his standing.

2575 The ram's excuse that he intended no harm to the person of the wolf makes clear that he understands the damage done thereby to the respect owed the wolf; his only excuse, a feeble one, is that he did not intend to cause this damage.

2584 "The wolf is more upset about his little accident than anything, and returns to it again and again; it seems he cannot get over the needless indignity of it. (He is a gentleman, after all)" (Pearsall, Chaucer, p. 497; compare lines 2562–63, 2567).

2588 Wondering how to distinguish between surface ornament and meaningful core in this stanza, MacQueen calls it "one of the most Lydgatean stanzas [Henryson] ever wrote" (Robert Henryson, p. 186); Mehl compares it to the stanza at the start of the Moralitas to The Cock and the Fox and adds that "in both cases there is a certain self-consciousness and a contrast of tone that is quite unlike Lydgate" ("Robert Henryson's Moral Fables," p. 98); after the sudden violence of the previous stanza, this ceremonious retreat into latinate abstraction is diplomatic and prepares for the safely orthodox meaning about to be derived from the fable; high rhetorical style is being donned like a robe of office.

2598–2601 That an overweening "pure man" can "counterfute ane lord in all degree" indicates a flaw in the system of badges of rank, one that can be repaired only by its expansion to an unsustainable prominence ("clym sa hie") and a subsequent correction through inversion ("tit thair heillis over thair heid"). Events in fifteenth-century Scotland bore out this principle: for example, under James I, the Parliament of 1430 passed an act that "grouped persons into classes of society and prescribed the permitted standards of dress for each" (Walker, Legal History, p. 183).

2599 Compare lines 371–72.

2610–11 For Pearsall, "there seems a particular uneasiness in the relation of fable and Moralitas when the reference is to social rather than religious obligations" (Chaucer, p. 498). However, the moral might also be seen as a counter to the situation of the previous fable, with which it is closely linked in terms of their common source in Steinhöwel; the potentially inexpedient emphasis there on a nobility based on integrity rather than blood is here covered by an insistence on the necessity for rigidly maintained ranks. But in his bodily reaction to fear, the lordly wolf has already submitted perforce to the common circumstances of animal nature, in a memorable reduction of natural equality into parity with beasts (lines 48–50).


The Wolf and the Lamb

The Fables return to their principal source, Romulus: De lupo et agno ("The Wolf and the Lamb") is the second in the Latin sequence (A. Wright, Fables, pp. 26–28). The simple, long-established narrative elicits special inventiveness in the Moralitas, "although of course the fable was commonly used to show how the powerful unjustly oppress the poor" (Fox, ed., p. 315). Henryson's foregrounding of dialogue has been likened to Lydgate's in his version of the fable (Davenport, Medieval Narrative, p. 90); however, Lydgate begins with the wolf's accusatory comparison between the "false and double" lamb and his "contrary" father (lines 260–66); Lydgate's lamb, much less eloquent than Henryson's, simply repeats helplessly that he stood downstream (lines 272–84; Lydgate, Minor Poems, 2:574–76). Dialogue is central to all versions deriving from Romulus, including those of Marie de France (Fables, pp. 32–35) and Odo of Cheriton (Jacobs, Fables, p. 95).

2634 Drawing (being dragged to the gallows) and hanging constituted a punishment notoriously enacted by Edward I in Scotland for treason; as perpetuated under Robert I, it has been deemed "less brutal than the contemporary English practice in that it omitted disembowelling and quartering of the victims' bodies, but was grim enough" (Walker, Legal History, p. 528; see also Bellamy, Law of Treason, p. 23; Walker, Legal History, pp. 85, 88; Fables, line 1460).

2650 The Ergo reveals the logician in sheep's clothing: evidently the lamb has been well-schooled; all the more does he irritate the wolf.

2657–61 Compare lines 1191–94; in the order in which they appear in the sixteenth-century prints, the order followed in this edition, the generational progression of relationships and hostilities — the rising feuds of the fable world — take form.

2663–68 The lamb proceeds to a higher level of authority, citing Ezekiel 18 on the limits of retribution.

2672 The question whether the father's guilt is visited upon the son opens up a scriptural discrepancy that the wolf is quick to exploit in his allusion to Exodus 20:5; St. Thomas Aquinas comments on the conflicting interpretations of guilt (Summa theologiae I–II, q.81, a.2; qtd. Fox, ed., p. 317); in insisting on the unforgiving pursuit of vengeance from generation unto generation, the wolf is upholding the principle of the feud.

2676–78 The wolf's accusation that the lamb's father planned to poison the water advances his attack on three fronts: it makes a distractingly scandalous diversion from the minutiae of textual debate (in which the lamb has already demonstrated his skill), a tactical response to the lamb's assertion that his lips are not contagious but sweit (lines 2652, 2654), and a sharpening of the actual charge according to Scots criminal law, the Poison Acts of 1450 having made the importation of such substances a capital crime (Walker, Legal History, pp. 527; 550, note 58).

2693–94 In a striking personification, the wolf is accusing the lamb of "intruding reason" as if the action were like asserting the right of a false claimant for a property; this "propertie" should be shared by those already in possession, the wolf's preferred "wrang and reif." Laying aside all his previous fantastic theories about spewing poison and the crimes of the father (lines 2672 and following), the wolf now declares that the real treason is that the lamb's insistence on mercy, reuth, is overturning the custom of crueltie in these parts.

2702 The grim parody of the Mass renders the wolf's inversion of values blatant.

2716 The wielders of "polished terms" are here the corrupt lawyers; the only other occurrence of the phrase in the Fables is in the Prologue (line 3), in which it refers to "feinyeit fabils of ald poetre"; blending terms is what poets do, like lawyers; it is an activity that mirrors the nature of existence in the world, with adversity intermellit with joy (line 368n); and, like fine clothes on the backs of churls, it often produces confusion and corruption (lines 2598–2601n); the theme reemerges in the first part of the Moralitas to The Paddock and the Mouse (lines 2910–25, 2912n.; compare Testament line 241).

2728–34 Landlords' oppression of tenants is a topic of complaint in Middle Scots poetry, occurring, for example in Dunbar, "Efter geving I speik of taking" (Bawcutt, Poems of William Dunbar, poem 46, lines 11–20; 2:382).

2745–48 Though the Leases Act (1449) and Diligence Act (1469) had done much to alleviate the problems of tenants, legal disputes over landlords' wrongful claims were rife in later fifteenth-century Scotland (Walker, Legal History, pp. 676–80); one such case, in Traquair (south of Edinburgh, some distance from Dunfermline) involved a group of tenants that included a Robert Henryson (Mathews, "Land," p. 46).


The Paddock and the Mouse

For his source, Henryson turns to the fable immediately following De lupo et agno in Romulus, De mure et rana ("The Mouse and the Frog"; A. Wright, Fables, pp. 29–31). The Moralitas follows the tradition of the commentaries in focusing on key elements of the narrative: "Henryson has taken the image of the paddock and mouse struggling in the water and then caught up unawares by the kite, and has made it into a powerful and gloomy symbol for man's earthly life" (Fox, ed., p. 325).

2785 Given its aquatic setting, the paddok (OED paddock n.1: pad n.1 + the diminutive suffix -ock; MED paddok(e n.) is not a toad but a frog, "watery and morische, crying and slymy, with a grete wombe and ysplekked therunder and is venemous and abhominable therfore to men and most yhated. And bothe in water and in londe he lyveth" (Bartholomaeus XVIII.91, Seymour-Smith, On the Properties of Things, 2:1243).

2795–97 Compare the burgh mouse's refusal of her sister's rustic meal (lines 222–23); a reluctance to work one's way through nutshells suggests a parallel reluctance to see beyond the surface of things (lines 15–16n).

2830 In the Flyting with Walter Kennedie, Dunbar recalls this sentiment, "Thocht I wald lie, thy frawart phisnomy / Dois manifest thy malice to all men" (lines 81–82); perhaps the mouse is so easily deflected from her justifiable suspicion because she bases it solely upon the frog's physiognomy.

2832 A translation (line 2830) anticipates the Latin proverb (Walther, Proverbia Sententiaeque Latinitatis Medii Aevi, no. 6026).

2842 The frog is alluding not to Absalon in the Miller's Tale but to the biblical Absalom, the handsome, rebellious son of King David (2 Samuel 13–19).

2865 The "murthour aith" is recorded only here and in line 2884; the phrase seems to refer to a pledge to protect the life of one for whom one is undertaking a service of carriage: Walker notes that such oaths were considered binding by both divine and natural law (Legal History, p. 600).

2869–71 MacQueen reads this oath "subjecting the pair to the god of nature" as an emblem of "the binding together of body and soul" (Complete and Full with Numbers, p. 97); compare lines 2025–27n.

2892 Compare lines 331–33n, 1525n.

2896 "The kite is evoked with the same kind of savagery as the fiendish churl in The Preaching of the Swallow" (Kratzmann, "Henryson's Fables," p. 64). Throughout the fables, Henryson's birds of prey (compare gled and graip, lines 1175–79n) have been scavengers; the Scottish poet refuses to emulate Chaucer's interest in noble eagles and hawks.

2901 The kite "hath a voys of pleynynge and of mone as it were messenger of hungir, for when he hungrith he sechith his mete pewlynge with voys of pleynynge and of mone" (Bartolomaeus XII.27; Seymour-Smith, On the Properties of Things, 1:635).

2903–05 In his translation of this fable, Seamus Heaney mutes the alliteration but does not soften the grisliness of this climactic passage:

That butcher disembowelled them with his bill,
Flayed them, stripped the skin off inside out
Like taking off a sock, but guts and all,
Their flesh only half-filled that greedy kite.

2904 From this starkly memorable line, it is possible to look back at what Rosemary Greentree describes as a "recurring motif . . . that of stripping away the outer covering, in a metaphorical or a literal sense. . . . Thus the literal references to skinning and stripping carry at least the threat of death, and we see a change in the creatures affected as the Fables proceed" (Reader, pp. 79–80; compare 15–16n, lines 774, 812, 1309, 1450).

2910–33 The first three stanzas of the Moralitas are in the ballade with refrain (ababbcbC), the stanza used for the Moralitas to The Two Mice (lines 365–96); as there, Henryson varies the phrasing in the refrain. The ballade befits a passage in which the moralization is straightforward and static: avoid committing yourself to a dishonest partner; many have been ruined by such relationships; it is better to be alone than to be bound in such a partnership — Henryson properly refers to the passage as "This simpill counsall" (line 2930). Nevertheless, he is about to enter a zone of discourse in which it is revealed that all is not as it seems in this fable.

2912 As in "Against Hasty Credence," flattery and lying are judged to be "Moir perrellus than ony pestillence" (line 30).

2923 Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria nova line 201 (Wheatley, Mastering Aesop, pp. 174–75); Henryson's fox might not agree with this line (line 760).

2934 Kratzmann observes the double marking of a change of direction at this point in the Moralitas: not only does the stanza revert to rhyme royal after three stanzas of ballade, but the new stanza begins with "explicit authorial comment" ("Henryson's Fables," p. 63).

2939–47 Although Henryson delays making explicit the commonplace "waves of tribulation" (line 2956), he is imitating that ebb and flow in his anaphora on "Now." Early in this "Now" sequence (line 2939) appears a brief reversion to the "quhylis" formula that has previously signified mutability in both narrative and exclamatory modes (line 1525n); Kratzmann notes the gravity of Henryson's style, "masterly alliterative colloquialism within the control of an insistently rhetorical form" ("Henryson's Fables," p. 63).

2948 The binding of the soul to the body is a theme also present in the Moralitas to Orpheus (lines 451–54). Spearing adds perceptively that "it is tempting also to see [the frog and mouse] as the literal and the allegorical, 'Standand distynit in thair opinioun' (line 2958), yet unbreakably linked" (Medieval to Renaissance, p. 194).

2966 The reduction of the audience to a single person, "my freind" (also line 2969) may reflect a pessimism akin to that expressed by Aesop in the prologue to The Lion and the Mouse (lines 1391–97), concerning the capacity of fables to hold and teach an audience (Wheatley, Mastering Aesop, p. 187); noting a parallel occurrence in Dunbar ("He hes anewch that is content," line 11), Bawcutt points out, however, that "Such addresses were common in didactic verse" (Poems of William Dunbar, 2:401).

2970 Wheatley (Mastering Aesop, p. 188) hears the voice of a "sadder and a wiser man" who is preparing to undertake what Aesop earlier referred to as "mair autentik werk" (line 1890). In the assertion that this fable is ending "schortlie," Kratzmann and Mehl perceive an irony that may involve a dig at the friars ("Henryson's Fables," p. 65; "Robert Henryson's Moral Fables," p. 93); compare lines 1890n, 2154n.

2972 A gesture of closure can be traced in this echo of a passage in the Prologue (lines 47–49n) in which the superficial function of fables — to show animals behaving like people — is inverted; the repetition recalls the "initial announcement" (Roerecke, "Integrity and Symmetry," pp. 96–97).

 

ROBERT HENRYSON, FABLES: TEXTUAL NOTES

Abbreviations: A: the Asloan Manuscript; B: rhe Bannatyne Manuscript; Br: Bawcutt and Riddy, Longer Scottish Poems; Bs: The Morall Fabillis of Esope the Phrygian (Bassandyne); Bu: Burrow, English Verse 1300–1500; C: The Morall Fabillis of Esope the Phrygian (Lekprevik and Charteris); DOST: Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue; Fox: Denton Fox, ed., The Poems of Robert Henryson; H: Harley 3865; neHt: The Morall Fabillis of Esope (Hart); MED: Middle English Dictionary; Mk: the Makculloch Manuscript; OED: Oxford English Dictionary.

title Bs (base text throughout), C: The Morall Fabillis of Esope the Phrygian.

The Prologue: Mk, B, Bs [C, H, Ht], Fox

title Mk omits. B: The Cock and the Jewell. [new line] Prolog. Bs: The Prolog.

4 plesand ar. Mk, B: Ar rycht plesand.

5 quhy that. Mk, B, Fox: quhy. Bs: that. Fox notes the support of Mk and B in 2344 but suggests that quhy that "may have been the original reading" (ed., p. 189); on the grounds that metrical regularity is a hallmark of Henryson's style, especially at the outset of each of the Fables, Fox's suggestion has been adopted here.

6 of thi. B: vyce of. Bs: haill.

7 O. Mk, B, Bs: Off. Taking a cue from G. Gregory Smith's emendation of Mk from Off to O (Specimens, p. 267) and noting the reading of thi in line 6 of the same witness, Fox regards Mk's apparent redundancy as the best pointer to the meaning and rhetorical stance of this passage (ed., p. 189).

8 a. Bs: the. The reading shared by Mk and B refers to a particular kind of heavy soil, hard to cultivate but fertile; the implications are richer than in the reading in Bs, which refers to soil generically.

12 springis thar a. Bs: dois spring ane.

16 Haldis. Bs: aldis.
sweit and. Bs: and is. For Kratzmann, the reading in Mk and B is "clearly preferable, because it gives a sense which provides a logical relation to the second part of the simile" ("Henryson's Fables," p. 53).

21 blyth. Bs: light.

22 For as we se. Mk: For as. Bs: Forthermair.

24 ay is. Bs: is ay.

29 authour. Mk, Fox: poete. Aesop is one of the Eight Authors (Auctores octo) of the medieval curriculum; to call him an authour is more meaningful, therefore, than to refer to him as a poete; it is understandable that in Mk, which provides the text of only one fable, this point is less significant than it is in the more ambitious compilations in B and especially Bs.

40 Gif ye find ocht that. Bs: Gif that ye find it.

43 his fabillis. Mk: this fabill. B: his fable. The variation is of considerable import for readings of the Fables: either this is a general prologue to the whole sequence of tales or it introduces specifically and only the ensuing tale, The Cock and the Jasp; here a crucial difference arises between Bs, in which the ensuing fable is indeed the first, and B, in which it appears in the middle of what seems to be a much looser sequence.

45 And to. Bs: In to.

47 Puttyng. Bs: Put in.
and. Bs: and in.

52 him renye nor. B: nocht derenye nor. Mk: nocht derenye and. Both derenye (OED deraign v.1; DOST deren₃e v.) and renye ("call to account"; OED arraign v.1) are precisely apposite here; since the next verb, arreist, has precisely legal associations, the reading in Bs is preferred here.

54 Quhilk. Bs: And that.
the. Bs omits.

55 the mynd. Bs: thair myndis.

56 he. Bs: thay.
beist is. Bs: beistis ar.

58 and facound purpurat. Mk, Fox: and in facund purpurat. B: facound and purpurat. Bs: as poete lawriate. Fox notes that facund was a noun in fifteenth-century Scots and points out that the preposition in introducing this phrase may be a scribal error (DOST facund n.; ed., p. 193).

60 Tak. Bs: Lak.

63a Bs: Finis.


The Cock and the Jasp: Mk, B, Bs C [H, Ht], Fox

title Mk, B, C omit. Bs: The Taill of the Cok and the Jasp.

74 Quhat be thairin. Mk: Tak no tent so at. Bs, C: Thay cair na thing.

81 lord or. B: only warldly.

82 Bs, C: Pietie it wer thow suld ly in this mydding.

83 muke and. Bs, C: muke on.

87 I may. Mk: It may. Bs, C: It may me.

89 leif and. Mk: haldyne.

92 ga skraip. Bs: ga scrapit. C: haif scraipit.

98 Bs: For les availl may me as now dispyis. C: For thyne availl may as now dispyis.

99 I had. Bs, C: haif I.

102 wyfis. B: wyse men.
that. Bs omits.
werk is. B: wark was. Bs, C: werkis ar.

103 B omits.
sum meit have. Bs, C: have sum meit.

104 not weil leif. Bs, C: not leue.

111 fen. B: as. Bs, C: midding.

118 fabill. Bs, C omit.

title Moralitas. Mk, Bs, C: precedes line 127. B [marginal, in a different hand]: Moralite.

120–26 In Bs, some confusion seems to have arisen about the proper location of this stanza, which is in the same civilité font as the fable proper, not the Roman font of the following stanzas of the Moralitas.
120 hes. Bs, C: had.

122 is lyke. Bs, C, Fox: lyke to.

125 hap. Mk: hoip.

126 Of fyre nor fallis. Mk: and noi sal. Bs, C: Or fyre nor water. Lists of terms typically pose difficulties for copyists; the difficulty of fallis has arguably produced simpler readings in Mk, Bs, and C.

131 ay. Bs, C: for.

132 haif. Bs, C: wyn.

139 can freit. Mk: fre. B: nor ket. Bs: can screit.

143 Mk, Bs, C, Fox: Quhilk at science makis bot ane moik and scorne.

145 argumentis. Bs: argumenti.

147 the. Bs, C omit.

150 Mk, Bs, C: Quhilk is sa nobill, sa precious and sa ding.

151 it. B omits.
with na. B: nocht with no. Bs, C: not with.
thing. Mk: gud.

154 neidit. Bs, C: neidis.

156 it nocht. Mk: it.
for. Mk: nocht. B omits.

159 it wair bot. Mk, Fox: I wair bot. B: I do bot waistis. Bs, C: it wer bot.

161a B: Explicit quod mr R. H. Bs, C: Finis.


The Two Mice: A, B, Bs, C [H, Ht]; Fox, Bu, Br

title A: Heir begynnes the tale of the uplandis mous and the borowstoun mous. B (in a later hand): The Twa Myss. Bs, C: The Taill of the Uponlandis Mous and the Burges Mous.

164 eldest. B, Bs, C: eldest duelt.

165 yungir. Bs, C: uther.

166 Bs, C, Br: Soliter, quhyle under busk, quhyle under breir.

167 in. Bs, C: and.

168 levit on hir. B, Bs, C: levis on thair.

171 tother. Bs, C, Fox, Br: uther.
that in. A: into.
couth. Bs, C, Fox, Br: can.

175 Bs, C, Br: Amang the cheis in ark and meill in kist. The arrangement of nouns in compound phrases, as elsewhere in the Fables, produces variant readings.

179 led. Bs, C, Br: had.

183 Throw. Bs, C, Br: Furth.

184 mure and mosse. A: mure mos. Bs, C, Fox: mosse and mure.

185 A: Cryand on hir fra balk to balk. Bs: Scho ran cryand quhill scho come to a balk. C: Scho ranne with mony ane hiddeous quaik. Bawcutt and Riddy consider both A and B to be "weakened by the absence of a reference to the fur or 'furrow', which vividly conveys the different scale of the mouse's world" (Br, p. 356). Burrow observes that "The sudden switch to the Lilliputian world of the mouse, labouring up and down the ridge and furrow of a ploughed field, puzzled scribes" (English Verse, p. 339).

186 sweit. B, Br omit.

187 couth. B: quod. Bs, Fox, Br: culd. C: cryit.

188 kinnismen. Bs, C, Fox: kinnisman.

190 cheir, lord. Bs, C, Br: joy.

191 A, B, Bu: Was kithit [B: kyid] quhen thir sisteris twa war met. Bs, Br: Beis kith quhen that thir sisteris met. ythit. Fox: Beis kithit quhen thir sisteris twa war met.

192 Quhilk that oft syis. A, Bu: The welcummyng. Bs, C, Br: And grit kyndnes.

197 semple. Bs, C, Br: sober.

198 misterlyk. B: maisterlig. Bs, C: febillie.

199 erdfast. Bs, C: steidfast. Bawcutt and Riddy note that erdfast is "distinctive but perhaps slightly archaic" (Br, p. 356).

202 Withoutin. Bs: Without.

205 hyid. Bs: glyde. C: yeid.

206 peis. Bs, C: candill.

207 thair wes weilfair. Bs, C, Br: this wes gude fair.

208 prompit. B: prunnigit. Fox: prunyit. Though the logical reading in Bs is arguably a simplifying substitution of a more for a less familiar term, Fox's emendation has not been followed; the meaningful, idiomatic, unusual prompit has good textual support.

210 Think ye this meis [A, Bu, Fox: meit] nocht. Bs, C, Br: Is nocht this meit rycht.

213 efter that. Bs, C: sister quhen.

215 ryte. Bs, C: rate.

216 syre. B: schyr. Bs, C omit.
levand in. Bs, C: leving into.

221 quhy. Bs, C: quhylis.

224 usit wes before. A, Bu: usit is befor. B: usit wer befoir. Bs, C: wes before usit.

226 yow pleis. Bs, C: pleis yow.

229 hartlie. Bs, C: mery.

231 tender, sweit, and. Bs, C: tender and wonder.

232 plesans. Bs, C: plesure.
in. Bs, C: in the.

235 visage. Bs, C: curage.

239 this. Bs, C: his.

247 trewe. B: gude. Bs, C omit.

251 na fall, na trap. A: na trape na fall. Bs, C: nor fall trap. According to Bawcutt and Riddy, "A and B seem to make a distinction between two kinds of mouse-trap (MED falle; DOST fall, n. 2) which is lost in Bs" (Br, p. 357).

252 on togidder yeid. B, C, Fox, Br: on togidder thay yeid. The loss of metrical regularity in the alternate reading does not seem justified.

253 skugry ay. A: stowthry ay. Bs, C: stubill array. Bawcutt and Riddy comment that "Scribal misunderstanding of a rare word, together with the common c/t confusion, could have led to A's stowthry" (Br, p. 357).
rankest. Bs, C omit.

254 Under covert full. B: And wondir sly full. Bs, C: And under buskis.

262 Withowt godspeid. A: Intill ane innes. The lack of proper etiquette has greater thematic import than the identification in A of a specific destination.

264 upon. Bs, C: upon thair.

265 Flesche. B: With fische. Bs, C: And flesche.

266 grotis, meile, and. Bs: meill and eik off.

278 bot how lang. A, Bu: how lang now. Bs, C, Br: how lang.

281–87 A omits this stanza.

285 mane full. B, Bu: furmag. Bs: manfully. This crux appears to Fox to depend on the failure of B and Bs to identify mane as fine white bread. Burrow, however, bases a case for furmag on the common association between mice and cheese (English Verse, p. 344).

287 gust thair mouth. B, Bu: creisch thair teithis. As Burrow notes, the reading in B is delightfully specific (English Verse, p. 344); however, it may provide an instance of Bannatyne's enthusiastically imaginative involvement in the poem he is copying, with something of a mixed metaphor resulting in the unwanted implication that the spices would have been greasy as well as the substitute the mice prefer.

289 thay. Bs, C, Fox, Br omit.

300 all. A, Bs, C, Fox, Br: ane.

304 nor serche. A: to char.
to char nor. A: nor yit to. B: nor char no. Bs, C, Br: to sker nor.

306 This. Bs, C, Fox: The.
passage. Bs, C, Br: passing.

309 flatlingis. Bs, C, Fox, Br: flatling.

311 wofull. A, Bu: wilsome.

312 fever. Bs, C: fever scho.

318 answerit. Bs, C: answerit hir.

324 A, Bu: And unto burde togidder baith thay sat. Bs, C, Fox: And to the burde thay went and togidder sat.

328 fled. Bs, C: went.
of. Bs, C: on.

331 tait. Bs, C: cant.

335 fair. Bs, C. omit.

336 the dosor. B: the dressour. Bs, C: ane burde. Bawcutt and Riddy comment that the reading in the printed texts may "derive from a memory of line 324" (Br, p. 358).

337 Syne. Bs, C: And.

338 So hie scho clam. Bs, C. Scho clam so hie.

339 And. Bs, C: Syne.
clukis. A, Bu: clukis richt. Bs, C, Br: cluke thair.

342 Apon. Bs, C: And to.

346 sair. Bs, C: fair.

347 ma. A, B, Fox: may. Bs, C: na.

352 I suld. Bs: suld I. C: suld.

356 scho. B, Bs, C, Fox, Br omit.

357 eftirwart. Bs, C: weill thairefter.

361 A, Bu: Of nutis, pes. B, Fox: Off peis and nuttis. The variants for this line exemplify the copyists' difficulty with lists of topically related terms.

365 heir. Bs, C omit.
will ye. A: quhill ye. Bs, C, Br: and ye will.

366 In. Bs, C: In to.

368 intermellit. Bs, C: interminglit. The prints appear to substitute a more modern for an older form of the word.

372 And. Bs, C: That ar.

381–88 C omits this stanza.

383 Luke. Bs: Lieke.
ondeid. Bs: but dreid.

387 Bs: Best thing in eird, thairfoir I say for me. The syntax of the manuscript readings is more idiomatic.

388 merry hart. A: sekerness. Bs, Br: blyithness in hart. The metrical irregularity of the reading in Bs encourages a preference for the reading in B.

389 freind, thocht. Bs, C, Br: my freind sa.

392 I. Bs: thair. C: it.
se. Bs, C: be.

396a A: Heir endis of the twa mys. B: Explicit quod mr. R. H. Bs, C: Finis.


The Cock and the Fox: B, Bs [C, H, Ht]; Fox

title B (in a later hand): The Fox and the Cock. Bs: The Taill of Schir Chantecleir and the Foxe.

405 and. Bs: and sa.

407 it excedis. Bs: is excludit.

423 hir pultrie. Bs, Fox: pultrie baith. The line in B is more metrically regular than that in Bs, and as idiomatic.

430 juparteis. Bs: jeperdie.

438 yow service for. Bs, Fox: service to you.

441 oft fulfillit. Bs: full oft fillit.

447 forsuth I held. Bs: I held up.

456 warmys. Bs: is warme.

457 Yow for to serve. Bs: To mak yow blyith.

462 Me think yow. Bs, Fox: Ye are me think.

463 and. Bs: off.

472 Quhat. Bs: For.
cok. Bs: fox. Capturing the speed and zest of the interchange at this key moment, Fox's two emendations here are irresistible.

477 walkit. Bs: wawland. The image, conveyed by Bs's wawland, of Chantecleir rolling his eyes seems weakly associative: his eyes are shut.

482 countermaund. Bs: that cryme. The reading in B is more specifically, wittily apposite.

486 reylok. Bs: hay. The printed text makes a characteristic substitution here of a familiar for an unfamiliar word.

494 of. Bs: in.

527 yow. Bs omits.
ye. Bs: he is.

533 Bs: "He had," quod scho, "Kittokis ma than sevin."

536 Adulteraris that list. Bs: For adulterie that will.

546 Birkye. Bs: Berk.
Bell. Bs omits.

555 raches. Bs: kennettis. The variant terms are roughly synonymous; the reading in B produces a formulaic alliteration that befits the scene of vigorous motion that is beginning.

558 spak. Bs: said.

570 unto a. Bs: out off the.

576 Bs: Na fals theif and revar, stand not me neir. The variant presents an instance of the copyists' recurrent difficulty with lists, a difficulty that in Bs produces metrical irregularity.

578 love. Bs: freindschip.

581 mair. Bs: mais.
coud nocht be. Bs: to be sa.

582 But spake. Bs: Quhairthrow.

585 In. Bs: And in.

592 ar. B, Fox: is.

602 mynd maist toxicate. B: mouth mellifluate.

606a B: Flattery.

607 The wickit mynd and. B: This wikkit wind of. The imaginative reading in B produces a mixed metaphor arguably characteristic of the scribe — a wicked wind is not like sweet sugar; see the Textual Note to Fables, line 287.

609 fell. Bs omits.


The Fox and the Wolf: B, Bs [C, H, Ht]; Fox

title B (in a later hand): The Fox and the Wolf. Bs: The Taill how this foirsaid Tod maid his confessioun to Freir Wolf Waitskaith.

614 B (LH margin): Incipit aliam fabulam. Thus begins an explicit connection between the fox fables in B that is arguably stronger than the linkage between the group of ten of the Fables intermingled in this manu­script compilation with other poems.

616 fatal. Bs: subtell.

618 miching. Bs: waitting.

621 Thetes. Bs omits.

623 off. Bs: up.

648 the. Bs: my.

649 wait. B, Fox: watt. Bs: ken.

651 fait. Bs: men.

652 bot. Bs: bot gif.

653 Deid. Bs: It.
and. Bs: ane.

655 all. Bs: my.

657 lyif is. Bs: lyifis.

659 alyk ar. Bs: ar lyke.

665 thence. Bs: hence.

666 of. Bs: in.

668 cum. Bs: cummit.

677 Bs: Ye ar mirrour, lanterne, and sicker way.

684 Na. Bs: A.

697 But to. Bs: Unto.
mele. Bs: kneill.

714 pennance. Bs: penitence.

716 A. Bs: Na.

717 Seikly. Bs: Selie. B: And seikly.

723 hyne to. Bs: untill.

729 faut of. Bs: fall no.

736 walterand. Bs: watter and.

737 All stonist. Bs: Astonist all.

741 boittis, net, nor bait. B: net, bottis, nor bate. Bs: boittis nor net bait. This line exemplifies the difficulties posed to copyists by lists of terms.

769 gane. Bs: gang.

772 The hird him hynt. Bs: He harlit him.

776 contritioun. Bs: provisioun. Here and again in 778, 779, and 794, the prints show signs of Protestant expurgation of explicit references to the moral conditions leading to penitence in the sacrament of confes­sion; it is one thing to satirize confession in the fable itself, and an­other to indicate the ongoing importance of the ritual for the reader.

777 mend. Bs: amend.

778 conclusioun. Bs: confusioun.

779 gois now to confessioun. Bs: now hes gude professioun.

780 Cannot repent. Bs: Yit not repentis.

794 Do wilfull pennance here. Bs: Obey unto your God.

795a B: Explicit exemplum veritatis et falsitatis. In B, the reader is invited to read the trio of fox thus, as contrasts of truth and falsehood.


The Trial of the Fox: B, Bs [C, H, Ht]; Fox

title B [in a later hand]: The Fox Tryed Before the Lyon. Bs: The Taill of the Sone and Air of the foirsaid Foxe, callit Father wer: Alswa the Parliament of the fourfuttit Beistis, haldin be the Lyoun.

798 Bs: Till airschip be law that micht succeid.

799 the. Bs omits.
lemanrie. B: lenanrye. Bs: adulterie.

802 pultrie tig. Bs, Fox: pultrie to tig. The infinitive is implicit without to; the more concise version in B preserves metrical regularity.

806 get. Bs: geir.
wrang. Bs: fals.

812 is. Bs: hes. The use of is as the auxiliary here for the present perfect of the verb of motion accords with grammatical practice in fifteenth-century Scots.

822 stouth. Bs, Fox: thift. Stouth is a specific kind of theft; B's reading is thus marginally preferable.
he had done. Bs, Fox: did his father. B's reading preserves metrical regularity.

824 throw naturall. B: for faderlye. Here is an instance of B's imaginative involvement in the text producing a shift in perspective (from the son's motivation to the father's) that does not fit logically.

832 wrangwis guidis, gold. Bs: warldlie gude and gold.

836 Bs: To execute, to do, to satisfie. In Bs, the traditional secular theme of the greedy, disloyal executors of a will has taken the place of the reference, preserved in B, to the medieval ritual, discredited under Protestantism, of prayers for the dead; see also line 837.

837 Bs: Thy letter will, thy det, and legacie.
is thy devotioun. B: is thy devotioun; thy produces a metrical confusion and may be "a spurious addition" (Fox, ed., p. 235).

838 he carit. Bs: him, he passit. B, Fox: him carit. Fox's emendation is unnecessary: B's reading preserves a use of carry in Scots as a transitive verb meaning go (Fables line 1767; DOST cary v); compare Fables 2029 and its textual note.

840 him. Bs: he.

841–42 Bs: these two lines are transposed; the sequence in B preserves a logical and chronological sequence.

848 Oyas, oyas. Bs: on this wyis. The herald's conventional cry Oyez ("Listen!") has been misunderstood by the printer.

851 Govand. Bs: Gritlie. Again, the printer substitutes a current, familiar word for an archaic one.

852 his buste. Bs: ane bus.
bill. Bs: bull.

855 We. Bs: The.

856 ay lestand but ending. Bs: helth everlestyng.

868 as the. Bs: als as.

869 gresis. Bs: gers.

872 trippand. Bs: creippand. B's birds are more sprightly than those in Bs.

873 a. Bs: with.

881 fut all. Bs: all four futtit.

898 jonet. Bs: gillet. The jonet is a fine light saddle horse, while gillet is synonymous with "mare"; a case could be made for either reading; the decision here is to side, as Fox does, with B because the scribe tends to preserve more unusual terms — if also to fabricate them on occasion (as found in Fables 824, textual note).

902 wodwys. Bs: tame cat.
wild wolfyne. Bs: wildwod swyne. "Some of the strange names may have defeated early copyists as well as modern editors" (Gray, Selected Poems of Henryson and Dunbar, p. 374); here and elsewhere, too insistent an avoidance of redundancy and apparently arbitrary association (why mention a she-wolf here when the wolf was named elsewhere?) may impose a principle of organization foreign to the work.

906 baver, bakon, and the. Bs: wyld once, the buk, the.
balterand. B: batterand. Bs: welterand. Burrow considers this emendation one of Fox's most perceptive and skilled ("Dunbar," p. 121).

908 gray. B, Fox: gay. B's reading may arise from the wish to avoid an apparent redundancy; B's seems grounded on the etymological difference involved — in greyhound, the first element has nothing to do with color but derives from Old Norse grøy, "bitch" (OED greyhound).
with. B, Fox: the.

910 globard. B: globert. Bs: glebard.

914 bowranbane. B: lurdane lane. The reading in Bs has not been defined convincingly; but in spite of its alliterative tidiness and relative obviousness (lane from l'âne, Fr. "donkey"), B's reading looks like a desperate stopgap.

919 Bs: With haist scho haikit unto that hill off hicht. In the version of the line in B, the a lyric inversion of the second foot conforms to Henryson's common practice (Introduction, p. 22).

923 blenkit. Bs: luikit. B's reading is more specific; Bs's anticipates lukit in line 926.

926 The lyoun lukit quhen. Bs: He lukit quhen that.

945 Bs, Fox: The tod Lowrie luke not to the lam. Within the zone of normal variation (see the Textual Note to 919, above), B offers a metrically more regular line than does Bs.

949 call. Bs: callit.

952 Tod Lowrie lukit up. Bs, Fox: Than Tod Lowrie luikit. Jamieson argues for the superiority of B because of the richer implications there in the placement, physically and psychologically, of the fox ("Poetry," p. 232n1).

954 rarit. Bs, Fox: cryit.

966 far doun. Bs: laich.

967 the. Bs omits.

969 thoill. Bs: bene.

971–77 B omits this stanza. "The other [sources] provide two additional stanzas . . . of direct condemnation by the author . . . The alliterative pattern seems Henrysonian though the metre is very rough indeed" (Jamieson, "Poetry," p. 234).

986 stait. Bs: estait.

989 beist into this. Bs: kynd of beistis in.

991 gray stude. Bs: stude gray.

993 My lord. Bs: Now see.

999 ye. Bs. omits.

1035 wretchit. B and Fox omit.
on his wayis. Bs: thus on he.

1042 a bank. Bs: abak.

1052 This new-maid. Bs: Speir at your.

1067 garray. Bs: merines. B's reading is more archaic; Bs prefers the word common to Scots and English.

1072 He werryit. Bs: Devorit.

1087 sis. Bs: assyis. The aphetic variant (missing the first syllable a-) in B is attested elsewhere (in French, Dutch, and Latin as well as Scots and English; OED size n1); it maintains metrical regularity better than does the explicitness of assyis in Bs.

1089 and party. Bs: pyking and.

1095 basare. Bs: bowcher. Bs provides a simple, common substitute for the specialized term in B.

1102 Apertly be oure leving. Bs: That to our leving full weill.

1103 Bs, Fox: And paynt thair mater furth be poetry. The printed text arguably provides a Protestant revision of a potentially unacceptable subordi­nation of preaching to the authority of poesye.

1104 liklynace. Bs: liknes.

1106 mare grace. Bs: incres. The printed text substitutes an inoffensive secular term to avoid even the possibility that the line might be read to refer to the earning of grace in spiritual terms.

1107 And gapis. Bs: Thinkand.

1111–24 B, Bs, Fox all present these two stanzas in the opposite order, which inverts the topical and grammatical coherence of the passage (e.g., the antecedent of "Hir," line 1125); if this analysis is correct, the inver­sion would have taken place at a stage in the textual transmission prior to the divergence of the manuscript tradition represented by B from the print tradition represented by Bs.

1118 contemplatioun. Bs: gude conditioun. A Protestant revision has occurred here in Bs; the rest of the stanza is marked by similar substitutions.

1119 Of pennance. Bs: As pilgrymes.

1120 Bs: Approvand that for richt religioun.

1121 That presis God. Bs: Thair God onlie. Concern that the idiom presis God to pleis will be misread (not "endeavors to please God" but "forces God to be pleasant") may have resulted in the attempt at a correct explicitness in Bs.

1123 Bs: Fechtand with lust, presumptioun, and pryde.

1129 Bs, Fox: Fra thow begin thy mynd to mortifie. In the last word of the line in Bs, note the false rhyme with fle in 1128.

1130 Bs, Fox: Salomonis saying thow may persaif heirin. The delay in Bs of the reference to Solomon enables the Protestant copyist to avoid the reference, preserved in B, to the penitent believer's capacity to wyn "thy sely saull."

1134 Bs: Assaultand men with sweit perswasionis. Thus Bs avoids mentioning the religious orders disestablished in reformed Scotland.

1135 Bs: Ay reddie for to trap thame in ane trayne.

1137 with ithand. Bs: draw neir with. B presents a more archaic, precise phrase than does Bs.

1139 B [line cancelled, with the following correction interlined]: Lord eternall medeator for us mast meke. Bs: O mediatour mercifull and meik. If B's correction is to be taken as editorial, then the apostrophe to Mary sounds a doctrinal alarm for even the maker of a manuscript anthology in Edinburgh in the late 1560s.

1140 B [line cancelled, with the following correction interlined]: Sitt doun before thy fader celestiall. Bs: Thow soveraigne lord and king celestiall.

1141 Bs: Thy celsitude maist humillie we beseik.

1143 that. Bs: thy.


The Sheep and the Dog: B, Bs [C, H, Ht]; Fox

title B [in a later hand]: The Dog, the Scheip, and the Wolff. Bs: The Taill of the Scheip and the Doig.

1148 unto. Bs: to.

1158 straitly. Bs: for.

1164 the dayis. Bs: twa dayis or.

1172 Bs, Fox: The oure off cause quhilk that the juge usit than. The reading in B is metrically more regular than the version in Bs.

1175 up. Bs omits.

1186 Avysitlie. Bs: The scheip avysitlie. Greater explicitness is achieved by the indication of the subject phrase in Bs, but a hypermetric line is thus produced; omission of the subject phrase in B seems based on a looser, less formal sense of syntactic relations than holds in Bs.

1190 enter pley. B: interply. Bs: enter in pley.

1194 as juge. Bs: juge as.

1200 In quhilk no jugeis. Bs, Fox: Quhairfoir na juge.

1208 eftir. Bs: efterwart.

1211 or. Bs: nor.

1214 decreitis. B, Fox: decretalis.

1216 civile mony volum. Bs: civile law volumis full mony. The adjective civile can be used alone to denote civil law (MED civile adj. as n.).

1218 Pro and contra, strait argumentis resolve. B: Prowe and contra strait argument thay resoll. Bs: Contrait prostrait argumentis thay resolve. Fox: Contra et pro, strait argumentis thay resolve. Fox proposes that thay may be a "spurious addition, made by analogy with 1216" (ed., p. 258).

1219 Bs: Sum objecting and sum can hald.

1220 ye, thay. Bs: ye that thay.

1221 held. Bs: hald.

1222 schrew. Bs: beschrew.

1224 summar and. Bs: sweirand.

1242 and. Bs: and eke.

1251 persecutioun. Bs: the executioun.

1252 and. Bs: he.

1256 he forjugeit. Bs: it commandit.

1270 Bs: Thocht he wer trew as ever wes Sanct Johne.

1273 porteous. Bs: portioun.

1276 be. Bs: wes.

1278 swa. Bs: tak.
skat. Bs: tat.

1289 frawart. Bs: hard.

1292 hair. Bs: sair.

1295 O lord. Bs: Lord God. The divine reference is made explicit in Bs at the cost of rhetorical emphasis.

1300 syn. Bs: sone.

1301 Bs: Loist hes baith lawtie and eik law. As elsewhere, lists of terms result in textual variation (e.g., textual notes to lines 126, 576, 741).

1304 jugis. B: juge. Bs: juge it.

1305 Thay ar. Bs: He is.

1306 meid thay thoill. Bs: micht he lettis.


The Lion and the Mouse: B, Bs [C, H, Ht]; Fox, Br

title B [in a later hand]: The Lyon and the Mous. Bs: The Taill of the Lyoun and the Mous.
Prologue. B, Bs omit.

1321 joly. Bs omits.

1324 lemis. Bs: bemis.

1331 gresis. Bs, Br: gers. The explicitly disyllabic variant in B underlines the metrical regularity of the line.

1335 arrayit rone. Bs, Br: arrayit on rone.

1336 viola. Bs: violat bla. In Bs, the preference for common, straightforward terms (violat for viola) has produced a distracting inappositeness of color — a livid violet — and a hypermetrical line.

1340 and the. Bs, Br: and of.

1345 maid a cors. Bs: cled my heid. As elsewhere (e.g., Fables, lines 776, 836, 1103, 1118, 1130, and textual notes), the Protestant printer expurgates explicit references to Catholic religious practices.

1350 chymmeris. Bs: chemeis. The printer substitutes the name of a more familiar article of clothing for a garment specific to a scholar or cleric (Fox, ed., p. 266).

1359 he weir. Bs, Br: can beir. The reading in Bs may arise from a confusion, not infrequent in Scots secretary script, between b and w (or v); B's reading presents weir as a form of the past tense of weir, "wear."

1386 dedene. Bs: not disdayne. Fox notes that dedene "was falling out of use in the 16th c." (ed., p. 267); further, the reading in Bs is hypermetrical.

1395 e. Bs, Br: hart.

1398 Yit. Bs: Yis.

1404a B omits. Bs: The end of the Prolog, and beginnis the Taill.

1405 wery. Bs: war. In support of B's reading, Bawcutt and Riddy adduce Langland's wery forwandrit (Piers Plowman A.prol.7); however, they ingeniously suggest that C's reading verray is superior: "verray is not an adverb but an adjective describing the lion's true and rightful prey, the venison which is later contrasted with the 'unhailsum' flesh of mice" (Br, p. 360; compare lines 1490–95). The location of the adjective verray after the noun it modifies is rare but occasionally appears as an indicator of a heightened, religious style, as in Henryson's Bludy Serk, line 109 (DOST verray adj.); in the present context, such worshipful eloquence seems inapposite, while the Langlandian implication of culpably wearying wandering may be closer to the mark.

1438 prodissioun. B: promissioun. Bs, Br: presumptioun. Fox bases this emendation on the clue provided by the otherwise semantically weak reading in B.

1439 Erer. Bs, Br: The rather. B provides a rarer, less modern reading.

1460 Onto. Bs, Br: Upon. The action of dragging calls for the preposition in B.

1461 A. Bs, Br: Na.

1463 thi yre. Bs, Br: it.

1471 spirituall. Bs: speciall. Fox suggests that Bs makes "a Protestantizing emendation" here (ed., p. 269).

1477 conqueist. B, Fox: compair. Spearing argues incisively for conqueist, the reading in Bs in a "precise classical sense" comparable to tribunall (line 1472) and honour triumphall" (line 1475; Medieval to Renaissance, p. 352n52).

1527 he knet. Bs, Br: the net.

1530 thus. Bs, Br: and.

1548 thy. Bs, Br: off thy.
gentilnes. Bs, Br: gentrace.

1549 with that. Bs, Br: this way.

1552 same. Bs, Fox, Br: samin.

1562 abone. Bs: about.

1563 mastis. Bs, Br: net.

1577 and. Bs, Br: that.

1599 kinbute baith for. B, Fox: commoun baith for. Bs, Br: kinbute baith of. Especially when used figuratively, B's term is the difficult reading (note the uncertainty with the idiom in Bs) and has been retained.

1612 expone. Bs, Fox, Br: expound.

1616 Bs: I the beseik and all men for to pray. Here is another instance of the printers' removal of references to medieval religious practices.

1619 lord. Bs, Br: king.


The Preaching of the Swallow: B, Bs [C, H, Ht]; Fox, Bu

1625 B: Excelland. Bs, Fox: Excellent. Though excellent can function in Scots northern English as an adjectival present participle (Fox, ed., p. 277; OED excellent a.), the -and suffix is correct.
argument. Bs, Fox: jugement.

1632 a thing. Bs, Fox: nor thingis. Burrow speculates that the reading in Bs may arises from a determination "to avoid calling God 'a thing'" (English Verse, p. 325).

1633 materiale. Bs: naturall. The reading in B is more emphatic and specific.

1649 dirk ressounis. Bs: all ressoun. Fox posits that B's reading "attempts to soften Henryson's statement" (ed., p. 278); Schrader argues that Henryson "was not trying to do away with all reasoning" and hence B should be preferred ("Henryson and Nominalism," p. 9n32).

1653 takis. Bs: tak.

1664 we. Bs, Fox: weill.

1665 we. Bs, Fox: weill.

1678 grene. Bs: off grene.

1688 Hir tume. B: Hir louid. Bs, Br: The tume. Fox emends this phrase to conform with the pronoun hir in line 1690 and to take account of the more specific adjective in Bs.

1701 ar bethit. Bs: bene laifit.

1711 smale. Bs: haill.

1744 lo se, and. Bs: and gude.

1754 praevidimus. B: providimus. Burrow notes that B's reading follows that provided in some manuscripts of Disticha Catonis (English Verse, p. 331).

1758 befoir and see. Bs: and foirse.

1760 thingis at. Bs: thing behald.

1761 ethar. Bs: the better.

1770 ferslye. Bs, Fox: ferlie. The violence of the flight is rhetorically significant; the reading in Bs appears to echo the occurrence of this word and its related forms elsewhere in this fable (lines 1730, 1775).

1797 young. Bs omits.

1829 swingillit. B: scutchit. The variants are synonymous.

1841 hes. Bs, Fox omit.

1851 into a branche litill. Bs, Fox: on ane lytill branche neir. Burrow observes that "litill by may represent a rare expression meaning 'not too close', otherwise unrecorded; branch here means 'seedling tree'" (English Verse, p. 336; MED braunch 4c).

1856 lyit heir. Bs, Fox: heir layit.

1860–66 In addition to appearing in the complete text of this fable in B, this stanza also occurs as a separate item in B (f. 76b), in the section of "ballatis Full of wisdome and moralitie" (f. 43b).

1874 rycht grit hertis. Bs, Fox: grit hart sair for.

1879 Bs: Off sum the heid he straik, off sum he brak the crag. Fox: Off sum the heid, off sum he brak the crag. Fox corrects the hypermetrical line in Bs; in the present edition, the line in B is preferred — anacoluthic purpose is detected in the semantically clashing off's.

1903 in. Bs: unto.

1911 stark. Bs, Fox: scharp.

1920 vaill. Bs: availl. The aphetic form in B is metrically superior to its more explicit counterpart in Bs.

1923 thus. Bs, Fox: is.

1928 warld calf dois. Fox: warldis calf dois.

1931 partit. Bs: departit.

1934 helpis. Fox: help is.

1946 to seis. Bs: fra.


The Fox, the Wolf, and the Cadger: Bs, C, H, Ht; Fox, Br

title Bs: The Taill of the Wolf that Gat the Nekhering throw the Wrinkis of the Foxe that Begylit the Cadgear.

1957 breith. Bs, H, Ht: wraith.

1958 waithing. Bs, C: watching. H: wetching.

1983 thay suld. Bs, C: I.

1995 sonyeis. Bs, H: senyes.

2001 C, Ht: And I can nouther fische with huke nor net.

2013 rude. Bs, C, H, Br: reid.

2029 caryand. Bs, C, H, Fox, Br: carpand. The emendation caryand was proposed by A. J. Aitken (Br, p. 364).
Lowrence culd him spy C: drew this boucheour by.

2087–88 C transposes these two lines.

2103 hakkit. C: snakkit. Like Fox, Bawcutt and Riddy prefer snakkit, "broke with a snapping sound" (Br, p. 364) but it is not recorded until the late sixteenth century (DOST snak v.).

2148 dow not. Bs, H: he will. The reading in B denotes lack of capacity; that in Bs involves a redundant subject.

2168 als wraith as ony. Bs, H, Ht: wavering as the.

2171 revenge him best. Bs, H: revengit on him.

2177 bat. Bs, C: bot.

2192 myne. Bs, C: syne.

2193 a stewart fyne. Bs, C: efterwart syne. H, Ht, Fox: efterwart fyne. For the emendation to a stewart, see Poole, "Henryson, Fables 2193."


The Fox, the Wolf, and the Husbandman: Bs, C [H, Ht]; Fox

title Bs, C: The Taill of the Foxe that begylit the wolf in the schadow of the Mone.

2284 contrufit. Fox. Bs, C: contrusit.

2310 juge. Bs, C: ane juge.

2372 hous. Bs, C: hors.

2432 Arctand. Bs: Actand.

2434–38 Because no text survives except those in the Protestant printed editions, it is impossible to judge the extent to which these four lines have been adjusted to tone down unwanted references to medieval religious practices.


The Wolf and the Wether: Bs, C [H], Ht; Fox

title Bs, C: The Taill of the wolf and the wedder.

2474 that. Bs, C omit.

2476 wichtlie. Bs, C: wretchitlie. Ht: wightlie. Fox cites the emendation to wichtlie proposed by Craik, but notes these witnesses' lack of trouble with this word in its earlier occurrence (line 553) and offers another, "less apt" alternative, wrethlie, "angrily" (ed., p. 311); while the reservation about Craik's emendation is persuasive, the alternative is not.

2537 till ane rekill. Bs, Ht: still quhill ane strand.

2548 Syne. Bs: Tyne.


The Wolf and the Lamb: B, Bs, C [H, Ht]; Fox

title B: The Wolff and the Lamb. Bs: The Taill of the Wolf and the Lamb.

2628 him. Bs, C: he.
presomyng. Bs, C: belevand. Fox notes that belevand, while current in six­teenth-century Scots, is nowhere else attested in Henryson (ed., p. 316).

2629 this. Bs, C: him.

2630 angrie, austre. Bs, C: awfull angrie.

2632 this. Bs: and.

2668 pyne. Bs, C: pane.

2673 cheris. Bs: refuse.

2677 into. Bs: in.
spew. Bs: did spew.

2682 audiens. Bs, C: evidence. Fox: audience.

2685 contrairie, or. B: contra and.

2690 law. B: way.
wys. Bs: gyis. C: use. Fox: wyis.

2693 Ha. Bs, C: Na.

2697 Goddis. Bs, C: his. Here is a characteristic expurgation by the Protestant printers.

2701 heidit. Bs, C: deid.

2703 syne. Bs, C: and.

2713 sutelté. Bs, C: facultie. Fox: suteltie.

2716 poleit. Bs, C: poete.

2721–41 B provides these lines in the following order: 2728–41, 2721–27.

2729 aneuch. Bs: full grit.

2731 in peax ane pureman. Bs, C: the pure in pece to.

2738 crufe. B: cruse. Bs: caff. C: calf.

2750 cairt. Bs, C: court.
and cariage. Bs, C: or in cariage.

2760 be rad. Bs, C: dreid.

2771 and men. B: I mene. Bs: and fell


The Paddock and the Mouse: B, Bs, C [H, Ht]; Fox

title B [in a later hand]: The Mous and the Paddock. Bs: The Taill of the Paddok and the Mous.

2789 rauk. Bs: rank.

2800 your. Bs: thy. In B, the Paddock uses the respectful second-person plural pronoun, at least at the outset of the dialogue; compare lines 2854–58.

2802 Withoutin. Bs: Without.
2803 yow. Bs: the.

2804 your. Bs: thy.

2805 mervell than. Bs: grit wounder.

2806 thow can. Bs: can thow.

2808 drowin to wed. Bs: drounit be.

2815 swyme. Bs: row.

2869 O. B, Fox: How.

2873 crappald. B: crabit. Bs: carpand; C: trappald. Noting that the phrase crappald pad appears redundant, Fox defends this emendation (a word otherwise unrecorded in Scots) in terms scribal error — the reading in C can thus be explained in terms of the easy confusion in Scots script between the letters c and t, and the reading carpand in Bs makes sense in relation to crapaud (recorded in Middle English), with inversion of ra and a minim error of n for u (ed., p. 331).

2877 to fleit and. Bs: for to.

2887 Bs: With all hir mycht scho forsit hir to swym.

2893 this plungit in. Bs: plungit into.

2898 owthir. Bs: ony.

2904 fettislie thame. So Fox. B: fetly he thame. Bs: fettillie thame. B's fetly and Fox's emendation are legitimate synonyms in Scots; B's he "looks suspiciously like a scribal insertion" (ed., p. 332).

2915 Bs: To thee wer better beir the stane barrow.

2916 Or sweitand dig and. B: Of sweitand ding and. Bs: For all thy dayis to. "[W]ithout conviction," Fox follows W. A. Craigie's emendation reported in G. Gregory Smith's edition (Fox, ed., p. 333).

2930 at. Bs: of.

2942 wardit. Bs: wrappit.

2946 fysche. Bs: fitche.

2947 wappit. Bs: wrappit.

2950 twin. Bs: wyn.

2957 ay waverand. Bs, Fox: wer steirrand.

2958 Standis distinyt. Bs: Standand rycht different.

2959 spreit. Bs: saull.

2960 B: The natur of the saule wald our be borne. The rhyme in B is imperfect. Fox records G. G. Smith's observation "that both versions are the results of Protestantizing emendations" (Specimens, p. 280).

2961 hevinnis blis. B: hevinly trone.

2967 gud deidis. Bs: faith in Christ; again, Bs has put in an acceptable Protestant emphasis in place of a now-objectionable medieval Catholic doctrine.

2972 a sample or. Bs: exempill and ane. The aphetic form sample is amply attested in fifteenth-century Scots (DOST sampil).